Skiff Reader

The Skiff Reader has been the big head turner at the CES 2010, and rightly so. It’s flexible, great to look at and probably has the most intuative user handling we have ever seen. Just think interactive newspaper and you get the picture. Here is a review, mostly from engadget, which gives you an idea about just how beautiful it is

Once you hold it, you're struck by how thin and light it is. Just a hair over 0.25 inches thick, it's also super light and feels good in the hand—it's solid despite it's airy heft. The screen feels huge compared to the Kindle or Nook, because it is—its 11.5-inch touchscreen is huge, significantly bigger than even the Kindle DX (at 9.7 inches). The size is actually a little awkward for reading books (it's wider and taller than even a big hardcover book) but it's excellent for newspapers. The touchscreen works well, responding to both taps and swipes easily, and the refresh rate is pretty good (meaning, it's still e-ink, but it's not slower than existing readers). It can also handle 12fps animation, which is pretty primitive compared to LCD but just fine for little ads or whatever.

The layout is where it really shines—it feels more like a newspaper than any other reader I've tried. The layouts are designed by the periodicals themselves, so instead of looking like a bare PDF of text, it feels like there's thought put into the design. To navigate through a newspaper, you can navigate to a section with the "scrubber bar," a scroll bar on the bottom of the screen that displays each consecutive section's name as you swipe through it. It's great; you can go right to the arts section, sports section, whatever, and it feels totally natural. You can also swipe on each article to go to the next page, or swipe up and down to change font size. Highlighting and annotating both work well, and Skiff plans to automatically upload your highlights and notes to the cloud for access later.

Magazines don't fare as well as newspapers; it feels like nobody really knows how to digitize magazines. On the Skiff, magazine reading is pretty awkward—you flip through full page scans, then tap a page to zoom in, at which point you have to slowly and uncomfortably pan through the zoomed page, with the e-ink refreshing every time you move. It's not a good solution, but like I said, this isn't a final release and hopefully they'll have worked it out by then.

Books look fine, although clearly the Skiff is designed for newspapers; there's about an inch of blank space on all sides when you read a book, because 11.5 inches of text is a lot to stare at. Other than that slightly unfulfilled feeling when you see unused space, book-reading should be no problem.