And that's sad, be­cause I don't ask for much!

I have read ev­ery­thing for the last three years in some sort of Sony Clie. First a SJ30, and af­ter its sad demise in a coke ac­ci­den­t, a SJ20 and am very very hap­py with them.

Now, as usu­al I may be a bit ec­cen­tric in that my favourite for­mat for ebooks is TXT files. They are easy to man­age, you can read them on any­thing, and they are gor­geous to look at if you use Palm Fic­tion, the best etext read­er by far for any plat­form I've seen.

Now, what do I wan­t?

• e-ink dis­­­play

• A dis­­­play that does­n't take a sec­ond to re­fresh

• One week of bat­tery life

• A way to put a bazil­lion texts in it us­ing some sort of card (I have about 3500 books in zTXT for­­mat in a mem­o­ry stick right now)

• Light (be­low 300 gram­s)

That's al­l. OK, I al­so want it to be cheap and at least open-ish, since I would pre­fer to be able to write apps for it, but that's sec­ondary (I nev­er wrote a Palm app any­way).

And sad­ly, the Kin­dle fails in:

• Not cheap enough ($400????) Plus a sub­­scrip­­tion for most use­­ful stuff??

• Not fast enough re­fresh­ing the screen, ac­­cord­ing to the de­­mo video. And even if you can live with the slow­­ness (I prob­a­bly could) it flash­es in an in­­­cred­i­bly an­noy­ing way.

• Not open enough (they charge you to up­­load files to it by email?)

• It's in­­­cred­i­bly ug­­ly. It looks like a gad­get from Star Trek: TOS. That's se­ri­ous­­ly not good. I know that was not a re­quire­­men­t, but ba­­by je­bus cried a lit­­tle when he saw it.

Of course the e-Ink dis­play looks great as usu­al, and the bat­tery life is ex­ce­len­t, and we are get­ting clos­er to a de­cent pro­duc­t, but not there yet :-(