iLiad about to ship

I was pessimistic beginning of this month about the text iPod iLiad manufactured by iRex Technologies, a spin-off of Royal Philips. There had been delays to the delivery schedule and usually this points to a lot of trouble. And I thought dealys would come up, especially as they blamed technical troubles with the webshop at first and later software problems. So I wrote that delivery would start in August at the earliest. But having received an e-mail from iRex Technologies today, I am more optimistic. The news is that iLiad shipments are about to begin for the customers in Europe. For the US customers the shop opens in July

The iLiad will be shipping during the first week of July to European customers who have already placed the orders; so depending on where you live in Europe, you may expect your iLiad either in the first or in the second week of July.

iLiad sShipments will be using version 2.4 which improves PC USB performance, and brings several bug fixes (for those early test machines in the market). The iLiad hardware and design is 100 percent complete and your iLiad functionality will be upgraded in the coming months via software releases. The next software release (v2.5) will take place some time in July or August and will bring Hotspot support and other software improvements.

As I registered for entry to the webshop, I got an invitation to buy an iLiad. But so far I did not do so. I would love to, but besides a piece of hardware and software there is no content yet that I can pick up. There is no Dutch paper performing an official trial. There is only De Tijd in Belgium doing a pilot. And the Dutch e-book provider will start delivering e-books in the fall.

Yet I would love to have the gimmick, if only for my museum, where I conserve amongst others the first Sony E-Book reader with Dutch e-books. I guess, that I will have to experiment getting PDFs inside and other reading material. PDFs would not be bad, as I can take along the iLiad to read and annotate the files on the train. Or I can try to transfer all my blogs from internet to the iLiad. So I guess tomorrow morning I am going to put in my order.

BTW David Rothman of TeleRead writes: A new iLiad video appears on the Mobileread site

UPDATE I ordered an iLiad last night; I did not want to think about the decision any longer. I wonder how log it will take to receive it.

Tags: digital paper, e-Books

Blog Posting Number 424