NB1: I primarily use SocialScope on my BlackBerry. SocialScope’s terms of use prohibit me from showing screenshots of their beta. Hey, guys, I want to show everyone how great you are!

NB2: Screenshots taken on a BlackBerry 9000 running OS 5.0

First Impressions

I’ve never understood the need for a EULA. They’re long, confusing, boring and a terrible way to make a first impression on your customers.  Twitter for Blackberry has a 30 page monstrosity.

EULA Hell

No one reads them, no one cares, find a better way.

Good

This app really shows off the power of the BlackBerry SDK. It’s a pity that more developers don’t make full use of it.

Tweets show up in your message list….

Message Integration

…and can be opened from there.

Open From Message

Images can be sent directly to TwitPic.

Send To Twitter

Apps like SocialScope and UberTwitter also hook in to the OS so that you can click on any #hastag and @name and be taken directly to that page within the app. I wasn’t able to ascertain whether this functionality was available in this app.

Bad

Limited view space.  At best, you can view 2 tweets at a time before scrolling. That’s not a very efficient use of space.

The Tweets Went In Two By Two

Poor navigation.  You can’t simply scroll left or right to move between pages, you need to scroll all the way to the top, or open the menu.

Navigation

The software also doesn’t remember which tweet you were on before you left.  It always refreshes the timeline and jumps to the top.  This is really annoying and it’s a problem solved in both UberTwitter and SocialScope.

Ugly

Missing loads of features that many users have become accostomed to.

• URL expansion.  bit.ly/fjhgkdfhg means nothing – use their API to expand the URL
• Embed images and media. Show a preview of flickr images, YouTube videos etc.  At the moment, it only appears to do TwitPic.
• No OAuth!  This is partly due to Twitter’s broken mobile OAuth support.
• No autocomplete. SocialScope will show a list of your friends when you type @ to allow you to quickly select them.

Conclusion

This app is amazing… if you’ve never used UberTwitter or SocialScope.  I also found it to be marginally slower than the other apps.

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Shades of Grey – Jasper Fforde

Jasper Fforde is one of the few truly original writers. The plot is so-so (a mystery, a quest, a conspiracy) but the sci-fi is just the right side of weird. Absolutely no exposition about why the world is the way it is – it’s left to the reader to pick up what clues they can. One of the best books I’ve ever read. Funny, confusing and sweet.

I’d thought that the last Thursday Next book showed how FForde had painted himself into a bit of a corner.  This new universe he has created seems endlessly ripe for possibilities.

The Year of the Flood – Margaret Atwood

Dunce that I am, I didn’t realise until half-way through the book that this was a sequel to the rather brilliant Oryx and Crake.  You don’t need to have read Oryx to enjoy this book.  Much like Cory Doctorow (see below) Atwood’s speculative fiction is a delight.  It’s certainly refreshing to read a sci-fi work with two strong female leads.

Oryx and Crake – Margaret Atwood

I first read Oryx several years ago – the plot is still blisteringly good.  The only downside is some of the references have dated a little (CD-ROMs etc).  Re-reading this immediately after “Flood” was a revalation.  The characters burn brighter for knowing the complementary story within “Flood”.

Neverwhere – Neil Gaiman

I remember a special feature in the Radio Times about the making of the TV series – but I hadn’t found time to read the book until now.  Much like Shades of Grey, the plot is almost secondary to the world which Gaiman has created.  It owes a lot to Hitchikers’ Guide – but that’s no bad thing.

Black Swan – Taleb

For a much hyped book, this really isn’t very good.  The basic premise is sound – unexpected things happen; plan for them – but the writing is turgid, self-important and too folksy for my liking.  I got halfway through the book before I felt like he was repeating himself endlessly.  I don’t think I’ll return to it.

Starship Troopers – Heinlein

Another one that has languished on my “To Read” pile for far too long.  Expertly crafted sci-fi which – as far as I can see – hasn’t dated in the slightest.

Unseen Academicals – Pratchett

Terry Pratchett had lost his way on some recent DiscWorld books.  Too many plot strands and too many in-jokes.  This is a stunning return to form.  I’m not in the least bit interest in football – so I no doubt missed many excellent puns – but this was the funniest book I’ve read in a long while. The plots work well together and there’s jsut the right amount of menacing undertone.

The Diving Bell and The Butterfly – Baudry

It’s a remarkable book – dictated over months by a man who can only blink to communicate.  Essentially it’s a love letter to life.  That being said, I didn’t find it particularly moving or – if I’m honest – interesting.  If you’re missing your appreciation for life, it’s probably a must-read.

The Behaviour of Moths – Poppy Adams

Bit of a random one, this.  It’s a sweet and engaging story which is high on detail and emotion.  AKA chick-lit.  But rather than blather on about dieting, this concentrates on family relationships, the nature of love and self identity.  There’s a beautiful sense of mystery  which is expertly left to the reader to resolve. I didn’t really enjoy reading this book but – oddly – I find myself enjoying the memory of the book.  No doubt it will be made in to a mini-series at some point.

Makers – Cory Doctorow

Once again, Cory Doctorow comes up with a compelling vision of the future.  This is a more accessible read than some of his earlier work.  The human detail is richly expanded.  It seems, though, that it could do with a spot more editing.  The odd repeated phrase and convoluted sentence structure are a mite distracting.  I am also at a loss to explain his fetishising of Disney. Nevertheless, a hugely enjoyable and mind expanding book.

Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman – Walter M. Miller

This is the sequel to “A Canticle for Liebowitz” – without a doubt one of my favourite books. I’m at a complete loss as to why this book was published (posthumously). All of the majesty from the original book is gone. It takes a small event in the life of the Liebowitz order and relates it with grinding detail. Similar in tone and scope to a novel like Ken Follet’s “Pillars of the Earth” but without any of the fire, zeal, excitement or – if I’m frank – plot.  This was a slog to read.

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Run VT, Errol!

Startup Screen

Click to download full size

I’ve set my startup screen to show my phone number and email address. Combined with the startup password, it’s a fairly simple way to protect your device and hopefully get it back if lost. Of course, all of your books can be taken from the SD card – so make sure you’ve got a backup!

Click on the above image to download the file. Edit it to show your details then save it to the root directory of your SD card as “start.jpg”. Unplug your reader and press “5″ Settings. Press the right arrow twice. Press down twice to select “System Maintenance”. Then press “3″ Startup Pic. If it has found the file, press enter to confirm. You can always change your image again to anything you like.

Screen Refresh

The refresh rate is extremely fast. This is because it uses a “Partial” refresh rather than the traditional “Global” refresh. The advantage of this is speed, and you don’t get the momentary inverted screen that you do on other readers.
The disadvantage is that you can – if you look very very closely – see the faint trace of an after-image. You can just about make out the ghosts of previous letters. Even after 50 page turns, they aren’t distracting – but you can hit the refresh button on the keyboard to make them go away. You can also go into the settings menu and set the screen refresh to “Global”.

Bugs

• Some have noticed that the 511EB displays Chinese characters where it should be displaying accented European characters like á – this is due to the way files are saved. If they are in UTF-8 format, all characters display correctly.

• The typesetting is a little off. It doesn’t force a hyphen into words like a traditional book (this is a good thing), but it breaks the line at any punctuation.

As you can see, when I say "
That's a nice book." the line
wraps at the wrong place. It'
s slightly annoying.

• On the default set of books, some of the words run together. It’s arguable whether this is a bug in the book file or the reader – either way, it should have been fixed during QA before release.

• Searching for books works, but looks like it doesn’t. Because there are no numbers by the files, it’s not immediately obvious what you have to do in order to select them. The search box takes up the first two “rows”, so to select the first book it finds, press “3″. For the second, press “4″ – and so on.
• Text-To-Speech is a nice gimmick, searching within a book is very useful. Yet they’re both absent from PDFs and the hugely popular EPUB formats. I cannot fathom it. They’re both rendered as text on the screen – so what’s stopping the reader from searching and speeking?
• Mac and Linux compatibility. This is a Windows CE device – but there’s no reason for it not to work on other operating systems. If a simple card reader from PoundLand can work, there’s no reason why this cannot. Removing the card isn’t hard, but it’s an annoyance for those of us not on Windows.
• The keyboard is slightly wasted. There is no note taking facility. The password screen only accepts numbers. Yes, it works, but it could be so much more. The placement of the Delete key is odd. It’s next to the spacebar. I’m used to the delete key being above the enter key. On this model, that’s the cancel key. So, rather than deleting a character, I often find myself cancelling.
• The Title Bar shows the title of the book you’re reading. Fair enough. But it truncates it for no apparent reason. So, if your book is titled “Lewis Caroll – Alice in Wonderland”, all you’ll see is “Lewis Caroll – A…”
• The truncating is present on the Bookcase. If your books are titled “Cory Doctorow – Ander’s Game” and “Cory Doctorow – After the Siege”, all you’ll see is “Cory Doctorow – A…” – good luck working out which is which! The solution is to save books in folders. So, for example, I have

.
|-- e_book
|   |-- Cory Doctorow
|   |   `-- Ander's Game.txt
|   |   `-- After the Siege.epub
|   |-- Lewis Caroll
|   |   `-- Alice in Wonderland.txt
|   |   `-- Alice Through the Looking Glass.epub

• PDF zoom. PDF is a rubbish format for an ebook. The page paradigm really doesn’t work when you’re on a screen. When the 511EB zooms in to a PDF, the page down button litterally takes you to the next page – not the next part of the page you’re on. You have to use the arrow keys to scroll around the page.

Finally, there’s no screen rotation. To be honest, this isn’t a feature I’d ever use – but some people like to have it.

Conclusion

As I said before, this is a cheap and cheerful ebook reader. The speed of page turning speed is impressive. EPUBs and PDFs work well, but missing some of the extra features like searching and Text-To-Speech. It handles large files – although performance takes a slight hit.
The build quality is what you would expect, a bit cheap and plasticy. But it only weighs 190 grammes. The quality of the keyboard is sufficient and the display is as good as any other eReader.

A Word on Waterstone’s

Given the number of bugs (admittedly, fairly minor) it seems odd that Waterstone’s are heavily promoting this model. My local shop has 3 rather prominent displays. To dedicate so much space without even testing the unit takes some bravado.
They have taken over half of their window display.

511EB in the window of Waterstone's

They have a whole book case devoted to the unit.

Heavily Promoted

They’re also putting it up against the much more expensive Sony eReaders.

Dummy Model

Yet they’re not as committed to this as you may think. There are no working models on display. With the Sonys, you can try them out, see if they’re fast enough, explore their menus – the lowly 511EB gets a cardboard dummy.

The majority of questions people have asked me could have been answered by having a working model. The Waterstone’s website is also full of people asking basic questions. Questions which really should have been preemptively answered on the site. I’ve registered with the site so I can answer some of them, but a device like this deserves more information up front.
Elonex – the reseller of this device from Hanvon – have committed to firmware updates. I hope, for Waterstone’s sake, that they come out quickly and regularly. Otherwise, Waterstone’s will face a lot of angry customers and will set back the progress of eReader adoption.

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Ebook readers are the latest in a long line of “written-word” technology. From clay tablet to papyrus to the printing press, humans have always found better ways of displaying words. The latest innovation is e-Ink. A remarkable material which simulates the look and feel of paper – but where the display is controlled by microelectronics.

As a book lover, I’ve been eager to get my hands on a Kindle, or nook, or Sony eReader – but they’re all prohibitively expensive. Until now. Waterstones – a leading book retailer in the UK – has started selling the Elonex 511EB. An eReader with the retail price of £129.99. Now, that’s not quite as cheap as paper – but it’s around half the cost of the Kindle.

Unboxing

The Elonex 511EB.

You also get a quickstart quide, a USB cable and iPhone-esque white earphones. The device comes with a 4GB micro SD card (Sandisk branded) – enough for around 8000 books. There are 100 free eBooks included – you can also download them directly from Elonex.

What's In The Box

Cost

I won a £20 Waterstones voucher in the Times’ Cheltnam Microfiction Competition – so the cost for me was £110. You can also sign up to Waterstones’ loyalty card – which will net you 389 points. That’s £3.89 off any subsequent purchase.  At a shade over £100 it’s certainly the cheapest eReader I’ve found.  It lacks some of the features of its high-priced cousins – no wireless, no touch screen, smaller screen.  But, to my mind, that’s not a problem.

Features

Here’s a run-down of some of the more interesting features of the device.

• Text-to-speech.  A synthetic voice will read in English, Mandarin or Cantonese.  The voice can be set to male or female.  It’s not the best TTS I’ve encountered, but it’s adequate.
• Memo recorder. As well as a QWERTY keyboard for you to write your own novel on, there’s a built in microphone so you can record any thoughts you might have.
• Format support.  The device will render TXT, HTXT(?), HTML, PDF, ePub and DOC.  It admits that complex DOC and PDF may not render correctly.  It has Adobe Digital Editions support should you wish to read a DRM’d eBook.
• SDHC.  The device comes with a 4GB microSD card and will take up to 32GB.  That’s probably more books than you could read in a lifetime – but leaves plenty of room for…
• Music playback. MP3, WAV and WMA. It doesn’t say what bitrates etc it supports.  No support for OGG, which is a disappointment.  The two speakers on the back are loud enough – but aren’t going to be replacing your HiFi.  The headphone socket is a standard 3.5mm jack.
• 

  MP3 Screen

• Picture support for JPG, TIFF, PNG, GIF and BMP.  Obviously it’s only a black and white screen with 8 levels of grey.  You can set one of your images to be the start-up screen.
• Security. You can set a password if you’re worried about it being lost or stolen.
• The screen is 800*600 at 170dpi.  The refresh rate seems a mite quicker than the more expensive screens – but only a mite.
• The device shows as a mass-storage device when plugged in to a computer – so there’s no software to install on your Mac or PC. I did have some troubles with Linux – see the bugs section.
• There’s a lock button at the top.  It also has the usual array of eReader functions – bookmarks, text search, remembering your last position, font size changing.  It comes with two built in fonts – Arial and Times.
• Lots of settings to play around with.

Bugs

For a device this cheap, there are bound to be one or two gremlins.  There’s support in the device for firmware upgrade – so hopefully Elonex will fix them.  Incidentally, eReaders like this usually run Linux.  There’s no mention of it on the box and Elonex doesn’t link to any GPL’d sources – so maybe it’s running a totally custom OS. Update! Pdurrant at the MobileRead forums notes that this is a rebadged version of the WISEreader N520 – a device made by Hanvon and running WinCE 5.0.

Firstly, it doesn’t seem to handle non-standard characters very well. The “é” in “Les Misérables” is rendered as Chinese character.
(The text is a lot more crisp than my scanner can show)

Character Encoding Bug

Text doesn’t flow very well in text files. It takes all the line breaks a literal breaks in the text – as you can see here.

Text Flow Bug

This is particularly bad in HTML as you can see here.

Alicehastextflowissues

When we take a look at the HTML, we can see the issue.

Alice's Adventures in HTML

The line breaks here are ignored which leads words to run in to each other. This is the fault of the HTML file – but this shouldn’t have got through quality control.

Linux support. I’m one of those crazy people who runs Ubuntu Linux. The 511EB should just show as a USB drive when plugged in. It doesn’t. I’m not sure what the problem is, but I can’t get it to show up. The SD card is removable so you can get access to the files that way.

File System

It’s a little inconvenient – but it did lead me to this discovery…

Beneath a rubber flap is the microSD card and a rather strange looking port. It may well be a micro USB connector – the new standard for charging mobile phones – or it could be something proprietary.

micro usb?

There’s no manual. Most of the features are self explanatory – but for those who don’t like exploring a device, it wouldn’t have been any effort to include a manual on the device.

Verdict

This is a great device.  It is missing a few of the features of the Kindle – but at this price point, who cares?  Sure, no one wants to throw away £100 – but if you left this on a train, you wouldn’t be half as upset as if you’d lost an eReader costing £250.

The e-Ink screen is made by Prime View International – they’re the same company who make Sony’s eReader screens.  So the quality of the screen is really good.  It has a crisp display – once you’ve set the fonts to your preference – and a quick refresh rate.  Like all e-Ink screens, it can be read in direct sunlight.  There’s no backlight, so you’ll need a torch if you want to read under the covers.

There are a few bugs – but they’re not show stoppers.  Hopefully there will be some updates to the firmware.

If all it did was display text – it would be a bargain.  Considering it plays music, has text-to-speech, has a full keyboard for note taking AND a microphone, it’s a lot of kit for very little cash.

I haven’t exhaustively used the device – so I may be missing something that’s important to you.  Please leave a comment if you’d like to know anything specific about it.

Waterstones

I’m a little disappointed to have to write this review.  But the information on Watersons’ website is woefully inadequate.  Would it have been too much effort to link to a manual, explain what file formats it supported, or had several pictures of the device?  I bought this from a physical store where they didn’t even have a working device on display – only a cardboard model.  If retailers are serious about selling high-tech kit, they need to ensure that all the information a customer needs is available to them.

Who would spend over £100 on a device without first seeing a detail spec-sheet? I hope this review has given you enough information to make your mind up about this device.

Read part 2 of the review.

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You choose your meal in a dimly lit bar then, guided by your blind waiter, you are lead through a series of curtains until you are ensconced in total and utter pitch black.

Choices are made from a set menu with no specifics other than vegetarian, meat, fish, or “exotic”.  This is a unique culinary experience.  Relying only on smell, flavour and touch brings a whole new dimension to enjoying your food.

Going with a large group of people was an unnerving experience – never entirely sure of who was sat near you, or whose wine glass you were reaching for.  I can imagine this would be a delightful place for an intimate dinner – possibly even a first date – as you have to rely on conversation to keep your companions aware of your presence.

The waiters were very attentive – although you can call out to them at any time should the need arise.

The food was tremendous fun.  Like many expensive restaurants, portions were not overly generous but given the mix of flavours and characters on each plate, this is probably just as well.  Rather than assault the few remaining senses, the chefs have cooked up a subtle treat which relies on your total surprise from the moment your fork first enters your mouth.

The dessert was a potpourri of elegant flavours and mouth-pleasing textures.

There is no doubt that it is a dining experience like no other.

There are some downsides – the restaurant caters for a large number of people.  Due to the sensory deprivation, it seems that voices escalate and emotions are magnified.  A table of women regularly found themselves shrieking at their merest touch from a passer-by which lead to another table raising their voices to be heard.  The assault on the ears was quite tremendous and rather disconcerting.  Normally one can use all the senses to judge the mood in the room – without sight it seemed that the evening could descend in to chaos at any time.

Emerging blinking into the light is a blessed relief and as refreshing as any digestif. We eagerly crowded around picture books with large photos showing the meals we had just eaten.

I won’t spoil the surprise by telling you what we had – the “White” menu was particularly inventive and the vegetarian menu was pleasingly different despite being revealed as a rather pedestrian offering.

At £34 for a two course meal and £39 for three courses, Dans Le Noir? is well within the reach of anyone who values creative dining.

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Ellie Levenson has written a book about moden girls and feminism. Take a look at the cover of this book. Pink, winsome, girly. Everything that feminism isn’t. Right?

Wrong.

“The Noughtie Girl’s Guide To Feminism” is deliberately trying to look like “chick-lit”. It’s written in a style somewhere between that “worthy” article in Cosmo and a ranty blog. The language and ideas contained within are kept simple – but not simplistic. It makes the point that there’s no inherent contradiction between wanting equality for men and women and shaving your legs.

Now, that may not come as a surprise to you. You may be aware that lip-gloss and the right to contraception go hand in hand. Not literally of course, unless you’re on to the advanced stages of the Kama Sutra.

If you already think you are a feminist or have read any “real” feminist books, this book is almost certainly not for you. This isn’t Germain Greer – it’s better than that. More well reasoned? No. More academically rigorous? No. More correct in its understanding of what feminism is and should be? No. More accessible? Yes! Yes! Yes!

This a light introduction. Freed from the constrains of academia and without the need to be ferociously “right on”. I think that’s a good thing. It does, however, gently point the reader to some “real” feminist books and blogs – like The F Word. The book is sometimes contradictory. Occasionally hilarious. I found myself disagreeing with some of it. I’m aware that I’m not a “noughtie girl” and can accept that this book isn’t meant to change my mind.

Ellie points out that lots of feminists seem to prefer infighting to campaigning for change, that some groups are only interested in the academic theory of feminism. From the vitriolic reviews by some feminist women, I’d say she was right on the money.

“Noughtie Girl’s” is the sort of book you might slip to a young female relative in the hope that she’d take it on holiday thinking it was another pre-swim read. The chapters are easy to dip in and out of and relate back to Ellie’s life experiences. She’s been unjustly criticised for only presenting a white, middle class, heterosexual version of the world – she writes about what she knows. This book is written for people like her. It doesn’t get bogged down in the ephemeral – it addresses the practical concerns of her target audience. Is that so terrible?

In the olden days, we used to talk about “Consciousness Raising”. A subtle and entertaining way to highlight our causes to those who either didn’t know or didn’t care.

That’s where this book succeeds. The vignettes aren’t a polemic. They’re not moralising. They’re not telling you how to behave, nor what to think. They tell the young woman that it’s ok to want something better than she has. If she want to be paid the same as her male colleagues or to be able to walk down the street without fear of attack – that doesn’t contradict with wanting to get married or wearing pink high-heels.

If you’re looking for a gentle introduction to feminism, I highly recommend it. If you’ve already accepted feminism into your life – buy it for a friend who hasn’t. It will get more converts than placards, seminars and pamphlets.

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