On Tuesday, 12th May 2009 at 09:47:29 (GMT +0200), Jon Richfield wrote:
I can read a computer screen all day without strain, but can someone tell me what kind of cellphone can give you say half a page of print at a time in comfortable size, steadiness, contrast and readable resolution for hours on end?
HTC phones. I got the largest one a year ago, HTC Advantage, because my priority in using the "phone" is reading books, not making phone calls. (If anything, phone calls serve to interrupt the reading; luckily, there's always the Ignore button.) Here's a review of HTC Advantage, with many photographs: http://www.mobile-review.com/pda/review/htc-advantage-en.shtml And here's my own HTC Advantage: http://aboq.org/athena/Ebook_on_HTC_Advantage_7500.jpg As you can see, it has Windows on it, rather than Apple's software. And it has Amazon's Mobipocket Reader, rather than Kindle. I find this arrangement perfectly satisfactory and have already read countless novels and short stories on this device. Yeah, the device is slightly bulky, but I wanted it to be: it offers the VGA resolution (640 x 480 pixels) on a 5-inch screen, and the letters are still comfortably large. (Of course, Mobipocket Reader allows you to increase or decrease the font as you wish.) The screen is so large a typical novel is between 200 and 400 electronic pages, where it would be between 150 and 300 pages on paper. That's *more* than half a page of print at a time. The best thing, compared to Kindle: the lit background. You can read in bed in complete darkness without constantly having to turn both your body and the book to the source of light, something I've always found irritating in paper books. Yet the most vital thing for me is the possibility to highlight passages in books and comment on them in annotations, while all of these get automatically transferred to the desktop PC whenever I synchronize the phone with it. Plus, of course, the option to store all the world's literature in one slim device. As to batteries, a single charge will let you read e-books for a dozen hours or longer (untested, because if you also use the device to browse the Internet and download emails, the battery gets depleted sooner). All of these in combination are so many advantages that I decidedly prefer to read e-books rather than paper books by now. As to comparing the screen resolution of an iPhone with that of HTC Advantage, it's really no comparison (the following 2 screenshots show the text of the same novel, beginning with the same sentence): iPhone: http://www.insidemac-blog.de/bilder/2008/07/stanza01.jpg HTC Advantage: http://aboq.org/athena/Athena-Mobipocket-PRT-FS.jpg (More pictures at http://aboq.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=577 ) PS: And, I first read Jon's email on the cell-phone before deciding to reply to it on the notebook. ;-) -- Yours, Alex. www.aboq.org [processed by "The Bat!", Version 3.80.06]