Short glimpse into available eink devices in the market (spring 2015)
From my perspective, most of the currently available ereaders are troublesome because of their restricted operating systems and limited file format support.
If you buy most of your ebooks from Amazon and are ok with seeing the extra trouble of converting .epubs into .mobi/.azw or sending your .pdfs to the device, you will most likely want a Kindle, Kindle Paperwhite 2 or Kindle Voyage. In a similar way, most of the other ereaders (such as Nook GlowLight, Kobo Aura, Bookeen Cybook Muse and PocketBook Sense), have their own bookstores and own supported file formats which of course does not include Kindle's .azw (/.mobi) format. Well, fortunately there are softwares, such as Calibre E-book management, for the file format conversion, but again you need to see the extra trouble of doing the conversion.
The starting point for my ereader search was that I have numerous .epub books in Google Books, a number of .pdfs and word documents in Google Drive and Dropbox as well as Kindle books in .azw or .mobi format (which I do not even know how to download so that they could be saved into another device). And I would like to access them all. Without any extra trouble. Period. And of course it would be nice to read also the local newspaper from the device. So. What I was left with was an option to root Kindle or Nook (which is probably not a good idea since I am really not a computer wizard and because I am not interested in personalizing screensavers which is for some reason the most commonly cited reason for rooting...) or buy an eink device with Android as an operating system.
Ereaders with Android operating system
Since I live in Finland, I did not even try to find an eink device with Android from local stores, but did some furious googling and ended up with a pathetic number of options: Onyx Boox T68 and Icarus Illumina (of course when I say this, people come to me and point a number of other options, but this is best I could do with google within couple of hours).
Onyx Boox T68 sounded like a good option when looking at the specifications. However, it hosts an older Android (4.0) than the Illumina (4.2) and at least based on The eBook Reader's review, its touch screen is not very responsive nor accurate (with which I would probably lose my mind). In addition, it proved to be extremely difficult to find since even Onyx-boox's own website stated "out of stock". The only place I could find the device was a German store with only few pieces in stock and a pricetag of 167€. Hmpf.
Icarus Illumina I was somehow able to ignore for a while although it popped up in some of the searches. This was probably because it was not included in any of the ereader comparisons I read, so I somehow thought it is not worthy of consideration. On the verge of despair, I finally started reading Illumina's specs more thoroughly and watched goodereaders review of the device on Youtube which eventually ended my search of ereader with Android.
Buying the Icarus Illumina
The most convenient place for me to buy the Icarus Illumina was from the company's own website. I could find the device also from Amazon, but since the company is located in Netherlands (not too far from Finland) I assumed that the delivery time would be a fraction of one from US or UK. I placed the order on Sunday evening, received a status email "Shipped" on Monday before noon followed by an email from UPS saying that estimated delivery time is on Thursday. I was right.
Now I will just wait anxiously for the device to arrive and tell you more about the user experience then.
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