Good idea, miserable product

Read between the lines of the other reviews and you'll realize this is a fatally flawed product. First, it eats batteries at a high rate, and if they run down you have to go back to your PC and reload the OS, apps and books all over again. Heaven forbid you should be out on the road.

Second, it does not read HTML files. It tries, but simply can't. It only reads Franklin's proprietary FUB format books or plain text files. The tools to build your own FUB format books are ludicrous. They require you to install a Unix emulator on your PC and work at a Unix command line interface. Not only that but the process is quite complicated and yields files larger than raw text files! Apparently this is due to indexing the poor book like it's a dictionary (as are Franklin's other products)! I'm not kidding.

They promise Microsoft Reader compatibility someday, but it does not have it now.. You can buy non-volatile memory cards, but you can only store MP3 files there and only in the specific MP3 format Franklin supports.

The screen is hard to read due to glare and the backlight is only useful in absolute darkness. PDA functionality is marginal (from what other PDA users are reporting).

If want a PDA get a real one. If want an eBook, wait. On paper this idea was good but the implementation is deeply flawed. Other eBooks will come along. Save your money for one of them.