Research on eBook Readers: still not ready to buy

I spent a night trying to figure out which eBook reader to buy. My conclusion is that it's still not thr right time to make the move.

I have the following options on hand:

• iRex iLiad Second Edition
• Sony Reader PRS-505
• CyBook Gen 3
• Amazon Kindle

Each of these products suffer problems one way or the other. For instance, iRex iLiad is too expansive (US$699), have to have online and ship from oversea, doesn't support merging sketching and document other than pdf, and seem very clumsome regarding to the moving data back to the PC.

Sony Reader does NOT support Chinese character unless you use some hack that I mentioned previously in my blog. And even then you have to live with a small Simplied Chinese character set. Something that I feel like I am not willing to after spending US$299.

CyBook Gen 3 seems to work pretty OK overall, with Chinese Character support and such, but limited only to .prc files. Until they fix they, it's not too useful a device to me, consider that I pay US$399.

And finally the Kindle. I don't like the fact that I need to live with their rules of emailing documents to myself in order to consume it on my device. I pay US$399 damn it and it better does things my way.

So in summary, there's more options on the market now, but still not mature enough for me pick one. In fact, I much rather get a US$299 Eee PC and use it as eBook reader. Of course I will definitely wait for the touch screen 9 inch version. For US$500, the new Eee PC is much better a all around device to replace my oven heat ThinkPad X60T as a reading device.