I mentioned in my review of the iLiad a week or so ago that I was experiencing some problems with the CF memory card I bought not being consistently recognized. About 50% of the time I started up the iLiad, my PYN 8GB Compact Flash memory card would not appear despite being physically inserted. Removing the card while the iLiad was on, powering the iLiad off, inserting the card, then turning it back on seemed to “correct” this problem…until the next time it failed.
As you can imagine, this failure to mount the memory correctly is frustrating. I’d be reading a book, turn off the iLiad, come back a couple of hours later, and have to go through a minute of fiddling to get back to reading. And I apparently was not alone in experiencing this problem.
A new version of the iLiad operating system was released on June 5th. Nothing in the release notes specifically mentioned fixing the CF card problem. But after installing the update to 2.10, I haven’t had a single incident of the CF card not loading properly. Hurray and thank you to the iRex developers!
There are several new features in this release of the OS as well: one nice feature which I haven’t started using is the ability to chose external memory (E.G.: Like the CF card) as your “home” for one of the standard document types. This is an important improvement: the iRex only has about 128 MB of free memory, so a supplemental storage card is almost a must-have once you start getting serious about using the device.
[tags]iRex, e-reader, e-ink, e-books, iliad[/tags]
Just pray the next OS release doesn’t break the CF card fix. Since they didn’t document the fix they may not even know what they have done. Happy Reading.
Dana
Let’s hope they do some regression testing 🙂
I’m about 600 iLiad-pages along in War and Peace, with about 2200 pages to go. I should be done in about two weeks…I’d be happier reading something a little more “fun”, but…I’m a couple decades behind on reading the “classics”. Since this book is sitting on my CF card, I’m pretty happy that the CF card mounting problem has been fixed!
Kelly,
I read Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire on my Rocket so I know a little of what you mean by bagging some missed classics in lieu of the fun stuff.
Dana
Kelly,
What are you seeing for battery life? I’m dismayed at the battery life reported on the iRex forums. My Rocket gets 18-20 hours battery life. This is an LCD at 40% backlight. What the heck is eating the power?
Dana
I’m getting poor battery life, maybe 6 hours of active reading time. This seems to be more or less average: people are reporting anything from three or four hours to ten or eleven hours between charges. Mind you, that is with an 8 GB CF card plugged in, which draws at least a little bit of power.
As for what is eating the power…well, they are doing absolutely no power management in the iLiad at this point. It runs the processor and memory at full tilt. The only thing it turns off is the wireless network interface when it’s not in use.
Currently, I don’t find the battery life to be a constraint. I read for a few hours and plug the iLiad in. However, I would prefer not to *have* to plug the device in. Supposedly they are working on power management features for an upcoming release of the firmware: the expectation is that they will be able to triple the battery life. Unfortunately, there isn’t a date for that yet.
Update: iRex has backed off from any significant battery life improvement coming from firmware upgrades. Apparently the power management problem isn’t going to be solved without significant hardware changes. They are, however, offering an optional “free” battery upgrade later this year to current owners that they claim will increase battery life by about 30%…
Kelly,
I get the feeling the iLiad was rushed to production, almost beta hardware. Maybe part of the headache is was it designed as a business tool rather than a consumer device? What do you think?
I exchanged a few emails with the president of ETI. He says they are working on readers using bi-stable displays such as eInk as well as still exploring LCD readers.
I suspect that they put more features in the iLiad than they probably should have. Wired and wireless networking plus pen input all consume power. But overall I’m pretty happy with the device.
If I had bought it wanting several days between recharges, my perception might be different 🙂