For what it's worth. While visiting a local Borders Book Store, I saw that they had a fully functional "Cruz Reader" on display and available to try out. Try before buying, a great idea. So head over to your local Borders and see if they have one available to play with.
Base on about 30 minutes of fooling around with it, my thoughts:
Display, 7 inches not bad as a size. ample room on the screen and surprisingly receptive to touch. Screen was not as bright as the Ipad. But $300 less. An acceptable trade off in my opinion.
Apps. I downloaded the Android Market app and then installed a few apps from there. They installed with no difficulty. I know that this probably doesn't apply to all apps but is still promising. The Cruz market is still a work in progress but so is the Android Market. so as long as we can get to the Android Market I don't see that as a major problem.
The one area I was surprised at is that Borders is marketing this as an e-reader and yet did not have a book on the device so as to show how capable it is in this area. For crying out loud, download one of the free books from Borders.com. Are you listening Borders employees?
My overall impression of the device is: A good unit, however Cruz has a better unit coming out soon, not to mention all the other tablets that will soon be here. At $199 I think that it is a bit expensive considering what we already know about the pricing of many of the others coming soon.
Anyway that's my opinion and I'm sticking by it.
Base on about 30 minutes of fooling around with it, my thoughts:
Display, 7 inches not bad as a size. ample room on the screen and surprisingly receptive to touch. Screen was not as bright as the Ipad. But $300 less. An acceptable trade off in my opinion.
Apps. I downloaded the Android Market app and then installed a few apps from there. They installed with no difficulty. I know that this probably doesn't apply to all apps but is still promising. The Cruz market is still a work in progress but so is the Android Market. so as long as we can get to the Android Market I don't see that as a major problem.
The one area I was surprised at is that Borders is marketing this as an e-reader and yet did not have a book on the device so as to show how capable it is in this area. For crying out loud, download one of the free books from Borders.com. Are you listening Borders employees?
My overall impression of the device is: A good unit, however Cruz has a better unit coming out soon, not to mention all the other tablets that will soon be here. At $199 I think that it is a bit expensive considering what we already know about the pricing of many of the others coming soon.
Anyway that's my opinion and I'm sticking by it.
