Saturday 11 September 2010

BeBook Neo July Firmware

Just a note of advice to anyone interested in or invested in BeBook Neo, to stay away from its new firmware (July 2010). It introduces more bugs than features, unfortunately. The new "Notes" section that allows to type in messages using the on-screen keyboard works very slow and doesn't save the message unless you go to the menu and save it manually; the old "Notes" is now called "Scribble" and now that I have a full page of "scribbles", it doesn't save new ones I create. While reading a CHM format document and clicking on a hyperlink, it might not show the new content until you click "Next" button (then it leads you two pages away from the beginning of the chosen section). And if Neo goes to standby while in a CHM document, it will hang upon return so you'll have to turn it off and back on. Can't say if this bug was present in the previous firmware or not, though. But what is definately new is that for a day or two the "Next" and "Prev" buttons didn't work at all, while I was reading an FB2 book (I had to use stylus to turn pages). One thing about FB2 documents that wasn't fixed in the new firmware is that a book is divided into pages dynamically, which means that often you see different text on a page next time you skip to it (that applies to bookmarks, as well). The tablet cursor positioning problem wasn't solved for me in the new firmware either, and above all that, the new design of menus makes it near to impossible to tell which menu section is currently selected. Oh how I wish that all firmware makers would separate bug fixes from user interface improvements and let people choose which to install! But anyway, I can recommend to wait for the next firmware version, hopefully it will fix more than it will break. I would happily downgrade now - if only I weren't so lazy :)