The phone is tiny, light, and thin, weighing in at 3 ounces. The design is nothing fancy, and it cuts a few corners (for example, no wifi—connection via Sprint’s cell network only—and an overall slower processor). In fact, for just $55 more you can have the somewhat more featureful and faster Pre.

But at least it shows that smartphone prices are definitely falling. Now if only they could rein in the calling plan prices, too. (Even if, as the article notes, Sprint’s are overall significantly less than AT&T or Verizon’s prices.)

Presumably, the Pixi will run the same e-book applications that the Pre will, so this may look like a reasonable option for people wanting a cheap smartphone. On the other hand, taken as a percentage of overall cost over two years, upgrading to the more-capable Pre is just a drop in the bucket.

Photo Note:

I’ve had more time to play around with the Astak, and the bloom is off the rose. Yes, the e-ink screen is truly amazing, and far clearer than the touch-sensitive Sony reader’s. However, it has certain other problems.

In Praise of Astak

Before I start talking about the Astak’s shortcomings, I should mention that the company itself has some astoundingly good customer service. For one thing, they monitor the Astak forums on MobileRead and pop up to answer questions.

Whenever I have posted a technical question on the forum, I have almost immediately been emailed by an Astak representative with suggestions and offers of advice. Now, granted, I do not know whether this is their default behavior toward all users, or just because they know I’m reviewing their product. I’d like to think the former is true.

Another nice thing about the device itself is that the firmware is remarkably easy to upgrade. Just put the firmware file on an SD card, slide the card in, and reboot into upgrade mode using a combination of keypresses.

My only complaint in this regard is that the instructions I found for upgrading on their website were not entirely clear. One of the buttons to be pressed is mentioned as the “increase volume key”. I assumed that meant the rocker switch on the right—but after that did not work and I searched some more, I learned that those instructions only applied to the 6” Astak reader devices; for the 5”, you press the page-forward button left of the screen instead. Just a little confusing.

Now let’s talk about some of those shortcomings.

Battery Life

One of the things that makes e-ink so great is that it only uses power when you turn the page. The e-ink page uses micro-capsules that are rotated by current, but require no current to stay set as they are. This is why e-ink readers have such a long battery life.

This should mean that, theoretically, an e-ink reader should use almost no power at all when it is “idling”. I should be able to leave it “open,” like a book, for days on end and pick it up with the same battery level that I left off.

(Granted, there may need to be some minor power consumption—but since it is not driving a display, surely it should use less than a digital watch, which is able to run for months on a single tiny battery.)

Unfortunately, this is not the case with the Astak. If I leave it alone for several days and forget to plug it in, the battery drains completely dry—and requires approximately “overnight” to charge back up to full again. This puts a damper on what ought to be one of an e-ink reader’s biggest advantages.

A Peeling Reader

I also noticed that my sample has started to develop a flaw remarked upon by other Astak users: the peeling paint problem. About half of Astak owners have found that, with a little wear, the paint covering their reader starts to peel off. Here you can see it starting on mine, right around the left page-turn arrows. (You may need to click to enlarge it to see more clearly.)

It is only a cosmetic problem, of course, and Astak’s excellent customer service again comes to the fore: they will, on request, provide replacement units that do not suffer from this flaw. Not everyone even cares about a replacement; one Astak user on the Baen Bar has just peeled all the paint off of his and been quite happy to keep using it that way.

Ex-Calibre

For some reason, I have not been able to make Calibre work with the Astak. I am not sure whether this is the Astak’s problem or some flaw with Calibre (which worked just fine with my Sony).

When I posted to MobileRead about it, it was suggested that I should remove the Chinese language manual from internal memory, as it messes with Calibre’s ability to connect.

I wanted to try to do this, but it seems at the moment I cannot get the reader to connect to my computer’s USB at all. It just shows a “charging” indicator and blinking light, and does not give me a “press Enter to connect” dialogue. But others seem to be able to use Calibre with their devices just fine.

It was not a great handicap, however; I ended up just using an SD card reader to copy my books directly onto my card, which I then put in the Astak. It just takes a few extra steps to make the copy.

If I were going to keep this reader, I might be more concerned about getting Calibre working with it—but since I will be sending it back, I am not going to let it bother me.

Moving on to formats…

Mobipocket vs. ePub

First of all, the majority of the books I read are unencrypted ePub these days, from Baen. I recently downloaded all of my Webscription purchases and put them on a directory of the 2-gig SD card I normally use for my digital camera, and put that in the Astak. The books load right up with no problem.

Reading ePub books on the EZReader is, well, “EZ”. They load quickly, and I am able to access the table of contents, zoom, search, even use the read-aloud feature (once I had updated the firmware to the latest version).

However, a Mobipocket book I read on it did not fare so well. This was 1634: The Baltic War, from one of the Baen CDs hosted on The Fifth Imperium. It was not available in ePub format, so I loaded the Mobi.

I found that, though I was able to read the file, the Astak reader was unable to parse the Mobi table of contents. There was a table of contents I could jump to, but it was all HTML links and I couldn’t figure out how to click on any of those links (if it was even possible at all). I ended up having to use the “jump to page” function in the menu to navigate through the book.

Furthermore, every so often the reader would lose track of my place. I would turn it back on to find myself a few dozen or hundred pages back from where I had been. If I find myself faced with a Mobi-only title in the future (at least while I still have the Astak), I will probably go to the extra trouble to convert it with Calibre first.

eReader and PalmDoc

In email correspondence, Bob Barry, the Director of Global Business Development for Astak, said that the Astak already supports non-DRMed books in Fictionwise’s eReader format, and they are negotiating to add support for eReader DRM as well.

However, I tried testing with three unencrypted eReader books I created myself and that I had verified opened on other devices, and the Astak did not even see them in a directory listing of the SD card. Very disappointing. It appears the Astak may not be the eReader e-reader of my dreams after all.

I was able to open a book in the PalmDoc format, though since it had no table of contents navigation through it would have the same problem as Mobipocket.

Awkward File List Navigation

I should also note that the navigation through the file list is a bit of a pain if you have a large directory. My Baen e-book files take 27 screens to list, alphabetically by title, and there is not any way to jump to specific titles. (Nor can I sort them in any way except title, date, or type, which is not terribly useful in this situation.)

So if I were to want to read Worlds of Honor or Young Miles, I would have to resign myself to paging through 27 pages of files to get to the ones I wanted.

I suppose if I copied my Calibre directory onto the card rather than my unsorted Baen ePub directory I might at least be able to navigate the directory tree by author, but I would still need to know what author wrote the book I wanted.

However, I cannot now remember whether Sony’s file list interface was any better.

PDF

But the PDF format is where the Astak easily falls the shortest. I had expected that, being a more recent device, it should handle PDF files at least as well as the Sony did. (You may wish to read my review of the Sony’s PDF capabilities for comparison purposes.) However, its performance left a number of factors to be desired.

First of all, I loaded the image-only PDF of “Bronte’s Egg”. Full-page, it looked about the same as it did on the Sony, only smaller by an inch. However, when I used the “rotate” option and turned the reader 90 degrees, when I pressed “page forward” the device simply crashed back out to the file list again. I tried multiple times, and it always behaved in this way.

Moving on to Dragon Warriors, we see that in both the portrait and landscape versions, the text looks pretty good. The problem comes when we use the “zoom” function, to break the PDF out of its formatting and zoom the text in a few times. The result: the first column on the page is nowhere to be found. The text below the header starts at the beginning of the second column.

(The Sony was not perfect in this regard either, but at least it put the “Introduction” header at the middle of the page and kept the first column of text before it. But no amount of paging up would reveal that first column of text in the Astak.)

Spycraft, the 160-megabyte overformatted bloat-monster, took more than a little time to load, but once it did it looked fairly decent, if much too small to read. Rotating 90 degrees did improve the readability some—but attempting to zoom in further simply zoomed out instead—and it remained zoomed out through each of the several zoom levels, until I finally reached the one that zoomed it back in to its original half-page view.

Also, zooming, rotating, and page-turning were all extremely sluggish—not that I am surprised, given the 160-megabyte size of this monster.

Spirit of the Century, a much smaller book and less-bloated PDF, came off considerably better. The smaller page size meant it is more readable in general on the Astak, and the non-cruft formatting meant it came off considerably better zoomed in as well.

Tables of Discontent

One other annoyance had to do with the table of contents. The Astak would read the PDF’s table of contents, and this included multi-level TOCs such as the one from Spycraft.

In a multi-level table of contents, if I clicked on “4. Chapter 4: Skills” I would get another table of contents, starting off with “1. Chapter 4: Skills” and then listing subheads for 2, 3, and 4.

So assuming I want to start off at the beginning of Chapter 4, I would click 1 for “1. Chapter 4: Skills”, right? Wrong. Clicking 1 would put me back at the main TOC. To go into the chapter, I would need to click 2 or up for one of the subheads. This is not a very intuitive interface design.

Conclusion

Although ePub files are a joy to read on the Astak, other formats are considerably less so—and the interface makes getting to those files somewhat awkward when I have a lot of them. With that in mind, though I am enjoying using it while I have it, I find I will not regret sending it back when the time comes.

We’ve known for a long time that a lot more people read e-books on multi-purpose than dedicated devices—they’re cheaper, they do more, they’re easier to pocket.

And more people have them. It is estimated 1.7 million people own a dedicated e-reader, and that number may rise to 4 million by the end of the holidays. But Apple has sold over 50 million iPhones and iPod Touches.

“The iPod Touch is always at hand,” Shannon Stacey, who has written several romance e-novels, said. “It’s my calendar, it’s my everything, so my books are always with me.” Ms. Stacey, who also owns an early Sony Reader model, said she had now bought twice as many e-books for her iPod Touch as for her Sony.

But others are still dubious:

“The Kindle is for people who love to read,” [Ian Freed, vice president for the Kindle division at Amazon] said. “People use phones for lots of things. Most often they use them to make phone calls. Second most often, they use them to send text messages or e-mail. Way down on the list, there’s reading.”

Of course, we know that people who read e-books have been in love with their small screens for more than ten years. E-books were one of the first big “killer app” uses for the Palm, and e-book vendors eReader and Fictionwise have been in business ever since.

Some have even gone so far as to predict “the end of single-purpose devices,” but that is probably still premature.

As far as applications go, the Palm app store is still pretty thin and the only ebook reader available seems to be Shortcovers. So it’s not a reading platform so far. However Winged Chariot Press has just released their own ebook for the Palm. It’s a digital picture book and you can find info about it here. Let’s hope more reading applications show up soon.

ReadWriteWeb thinks that the price point at which e-book readers will start to take off is $99, while All Things D thinks the sweet spot is $49. Either way, with the cheapest dedicated e-ink reader weighing in at $199 right now, that price point is still a way off.

But it will come. It used to be that color LCD PDAs were $500 and up, and griped about by people who insisted that black and white was good enough for them (mainly because they couldn’t afford color). Now every LCD device is color, you can’t get stand-alone PDAs anymore (except perhaps the iPod Touch), and AT&T is offering Palm Centro color LCD smartphones for $50 (with contract).

In a few years, a lot more of us will be reading off of e-ink. However, Forrester does not think e-ink e-readers’ adoption will ever be as widespread as mp3 players’—there is not enough interest in reading, on the whole, for huge numbers to invest in single-use devices.

In the end, it may take the development of fast color e-ink and its use in iPhones for the majority of people to have e-ink in their pockets.

pnh “believes print books will continue on into [the] future,” but has himself been reading e-books since the era of the Palm Pilot. (In the comments, he outs himself as the nameless “editor of science-fiction books” cited as an enthusiastic Palm Pilot convert in a 1998 Salon Magazine article.)

The small visual inconvenience of e-books is made up for with find and search functions, and the fungibility of digital text. My authors deliver manuscripts to me electronically – I encourage that. I will be happy if I never have to carry around 500 sheets of 8×11 paper ever again. That’s me, and I process text for a living.

He notes that e-books’ market share has historically been small, but is now growing logarithmically, and addresses Tor’s much-maligned e-book strategy.

Tor.com was a place where people complained about lack of availability of e-books for a while. Before we launched the site we had this free e-book giveaway and people thought Tor.com would be all about e-books. But it really wasn’t. E-books are phase B and C.

Tor, pnh explains, recognizes that the e-book market is far from settled yet, and does not want to get locked into any single platform in these still-early days of the market.

pnh also feels just as I do about the spectre of “interactivity” in e-books: linear narrative fiction has been around for a long time. Despite the suggestions of some that “interactivity” will be the wave of the future, it doesn’t appear that persistent narratives are going anywhere. He also has some interesting (and, for a professional editor, perhaps unexpected) things to say about fanfic.

This is a fascinating interview; don’t miss it.

Some first-class e-reader software will be showing up in the Android world without ties to particular hardware.

I hope Palm survives, and I wish only the best of luck to Pre buyers. But the Pre would not be a device for me, whether or not I needed the phone capabilities.

And now, alas, a new reason exists not to buy a Pre. Some Palm Pre screens are cracking, according to an Information Weekly Weblog, Phones Review and other sources. From the IW blog:

I can’t personally attest to these problems, as the Pre phones I’ve played with felt okay (even if the lip was a bit sharp). Our official review wasn’t that impressed with the build quality, as it said the "materials and build quality feel somewhat cheap and ‘plasticky.’" The fans over at PreCentral’s forums are calling the build quality "horrible," "a big old fat fail," and other things I probably shouldn’t repeat. One user even uploaded a photo of his Pre and said there is an unsightly gap emerging between his screen and the body of the phone.

Am I wet? Pre buyers and about-to-be-buyers, please speak up! Are the reports exaggerating the problems? And is the Pre so promising as an e-book machine that you bought or will buy it anyway with that use largely in mind?

On the positive side: eReader will soon be available for the Pre—allowing you access books in this popular format, including DRMed ones. What’s more, Palm can always make an all-out effort to address the QC problems. And meanwhile Sprint is said to be quick to replace defective screens.

Today a Palm press release indicates that Rubinstein is moving up from his position of Executive Chairman to the big seat: Chairman and CEO of Palm. This seems to suggest a good deal of approval of his performance so far on the part of the Palm Board of Directors. It also means Rubinstein is going to be in the driver’s seat for the next few years as the Pre and its successors fight with Apple and Blackberry for market share.

Here’s hoping Rubinstein can lead Palm to success in the smartphone market. Much as I enjoy using my iPod Touch, there needs to be competition for the market to be its healthiest.

I’m not sure whether the OS the Centro is running is the same as the Garnet that my Palm and Palm-compatible PDAs ran, but the screenshots certainly look identical. If so, this is the latest iteration of the original eReader, which will still run on any PalmOS device with enough memory to load it. (I have it on the Clié 415 that I originally bought for my Dad but decided to keep after he didn’t like it.)

It gave me a feeling of nostalgia to see the old familiar fonts and screen displays again. The iPhone version of eReader looks nice and works great, but there’s just something about those old Palm PDA fonts that takes me back to the good old days.

Applying (via the link to Palm’s blog, above) involves filling out a survey about what you do all day, what you are passionate about, what you use your current phone for, what social networks you use, and how you would describe yourself and your phone in one word each.

I’ve gotten my application in, and will be keeping my fingers crossed.

This is an important topic for e-books because smartphones, from everything I read, are the fastest growing segment of the phone market today. Each and every one of these smartphones can make a very capable e-book reader. I have a Palm Treo 680 which runs the Palm OS, MWg Zinc II which runs Windows Mobile, iPhone, and a Nokia E71 which runs Symbian. All of these phone make decent e-book readers and all of them have ereading software available from Fictionwise and other sources. Despite the hype over the Kindle and Sony Reader, it is very possible that the future of ereading may be on the phone.

Take a look at Jason’s article. He doesn’t think that Android stands much of a chance, and I agree with him:

However, the big problem with Android is that it is not a business-ready smartphone, unless you are running your company e-mail through Gmail and your productivity suite is Google Apps. The rest of the world – and that’s most of us – are out of luck because Android requires a Google login and basically ties only to Google software. There’s no Exchange support, and advanced IT security and manageability are lacking.

Google has also had a difficult time wooing developers to Android, despite the fact that it made the software open source. One of the problems is that Google angered some of its Android developers by only releasing the software development kit (SDK) to an exclusive group of developers at one point during the preparation to bring the G1 to market.

For all of those reasons, I think Android is likely to get squeezed and open source mobile developers are much more likely to jump board with Symbian or even Palm. However, Android could become a big hit on netbooks ….

From her article: When I got my first Palm PDA, I was really shocked to learn that I could put a whole book on the device. I remember thinking, “No Way!”. And imagine my shock when I discovered that I could put an entire library of books on the thing! That was my favorite thing to do with my Palm PDA; read eBooks. I still bought real books too though because I collect them and want my book shelves crammed as full as I can get them. Books are my treasures.

Jennifer’s article is also one of the best commentaries on the Kindle 2 that I have seen so far. The pictures are first rate.

Palm Pre "will help you live your life more effectively." The design looks like an oblong rounded rectangle.

It has EVDO rev.A, WiFi, bluetooth, a gesture area on the screen for navigation and use, a removable battery, micro USB, USB mass storage support, a 3.5mm Headphone Jack.

11:21 AM: The new UI is called Web OS, and it’s designed to be so simple, you only need to focus on the information and content you want, not the OS itself.

I would just like to congratulate Palm for choosing a name for its new device that will Google-match to every single “Palm Pre-Owned” or “Palm Pre-Announces” post on the Internet.