So I picked up one of these for my birthday (Sony e-reader touch edition, PRS-650):
http://www.sonystyle.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?storeId=10151&catalogId=10551&langId=-1&productId=8198552921666257815
It's basically an e-reader (6" eInk display) with a touch screen on top. I heard the 600 model had a lot of issues, laggy, slow, etc.. They've apparently fixed all of that in this version.
Let me start by saying, if I wanted to read (and buy) e-books, I would have bought a kindle. But that's not what I bought it for, I bought it to read pdfs. I read a ton of papers for my research and printing them all isn't really possible. Reading them off the computer is a pain for many reasons (staring at an lcd, stuck sitting at my desk, too many distractions (email, googling stuff I come accross in the paper, etc...)).
The short story: this thing is pretty awesome, but the technology isn't quite perfect yet for reading pdfs. They really need to make a full 8.5x11 e-ink display. But I like it enough that I'm going to keep it for this purpose.
The long story:PDF viewing:The sony e-reader seems to have the best pdf support on the market. It can reflow pdfs (ie, take the text and lay it out to use the full screen and adjustable font sizes), although you lose the original pdf layout (and generally figures and tables). It also has modes for viewing 2-column and 3 column pdfs. It divides the page up into 4 regions (for 2 column) and the next/previous page buttons move you through the document in the proper order. This also preserves the pdf formatting so you can see figures and tables properly. For single column pdfs its quite good, there is a "margin trim" mode that cuts the margins to make the text the full screen width. Putting this into landscape view makes the text the perfect size for reading, again without losing the pdf formatting as you do by reflowing the document. With these two modes I can read basically all of the pdf formats I need at about the same font size as a printed version (many of the conferences I read papers from use a 9pt font, so small is normal). If I was an old person with poor vision I probably wouldn't like this though.
Annotations:Then of course, there's the touch screen. It's quite responsive and accurate, I'm impressed so far. You can annotated documents (including pdfs) in three ways. First you can highlight regions of text. This is handy because afterwards you can export the highlighted regions to a text file, basically getting a nice little summary of the document if you highlight the important bits as you go (sometimes, the exported file loses spaces though, a little annoying). Second, you can do freehand drawing (comes with a stylus). I though this would be my preferred annotation method but it has a big drawback, you can't print/export the annotations! Like the highlighting, you can export the regions of text touched by an annotation, but not the annotations themselves. That basically means you have to have the reader with you to view the annotations. Also, the screen refresh is a little slow so you need to write slowly if you want to actually write words. But underlining, crossing things out, etc... is pretty easy. The last mode is to attach some text to a page using the on-screen keyboard. The keyboard is surprisingly responsive (type as fast as you want and the display will eventually keep up).
e-reader:There are of course all of the benefits of an e-reader (over a tablet for example). It's extremely light, I read for about two hours and my hand/wrist did not get tired. The e-ink is great to look at, you don't get the tiring brightness of an LCD. And of course having hundreds of documents in a tiny portable reader is awesome, something I can't do with printed copies. I also like that you can create "collections", basically a categorization of your documents. I have documents classified into different topics which is nice to help organize things.
The downsides to this particular e-reader: no wireless connectivity (3g or wifi). I think this would annoy me if I wanted to download a lot of e-books or receive newspapers/magazines, but since that's not my use-case I prefer having no wifi and a smaller price tag. Another small anoyance is that the device displays document titles, but not filenames. Many pdfs end up with the name "paper.pdf" or "Microsoft Word Document", etc.. This can make finding the paper you're looking for a bit of a pain.
I've also downloaded a few ebooks from project gutenburg, they look really nice and easily readable, the images and graphics as well.
Overall, I give this an
8.5 / 10 as a pdf reader.
