I am looking at a 9-10" mini-notebook and an eBook reader myself.
My choices for mini-notebook were either Samsung NC10 or the more expensive N140 that is its successor. They only sold N140 with windows7 starter so I would have needed to pay even more for windows upgrade. Also windows7 seems to use more battery than XP and the product info about N140 battery life is not true. In the shop they said its 11 hours but in tests its 6.
N140 has better trackpad but I rather use mini-mouse instead so it doesnt really matter. NC10 is a test-winner so its proven to be good and it was rather cheap. Also XP is more than enough because Im only going to play older games and other stuff with it and they work best in XP. Also XP was in finnish while the more expensive N140 windows7 was only in english.
Is eSlick capable of displaying color images in pdf's?
No current reader is able to display colors. Color pictures are shown in grey. eSlick shows only 4 grey scales while som best readers show 16. Ive checked out multiple color covers from the eslick and they show just find. They dont have colors but they are still nice images and totally recogniceable.
Basicly ebook screens are a special greyscale that is easy on the eyes and not LCD. They are perfect for reading single-column books (multi-column text not good). Black text, white background. There is one reader in development that is suppose to have color but if its gonna work and when its gonna arrive I dont know. It could take many years still to get a working one for mass market. While waiting Im going to use eslick!
Heres som of the readers in comparison:
http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/E-book_Reader_Matrix eSlick isnt in it but its a slightly improved version of cybook gen3. I didnt have much choice since only eslick and few others were available in Finland.
One of the important things in ereader is boot-time. At worst it can take up to 45 seconds in som readers (erex?). eSlick does it in 10s which was a nice suprise. The best things about ebook reader are long battery life (days) and the nice untiring displays. Ebook reader is not a lightsource so it doesnt make your eyes tired like regular screen.