Degrees

Nope, the reviewer does mean 360 degrees. Keep turning the DX by 90 degrees to the left or right and the screen keeps re-orientating itself. OK, when you have it upside down it has only turned though 180 degrees but the point is you can keep on turning it through 270 and 360 until you are back where you started.

$450+?

Look, it's a black n white e-reader+ with a non standard keyboard layout, no touch screen, no color, no application support, no bluetooth, no TV connectivity, no camera support, no file system to speak of, no document editing capabilities, and it's still smaller than the iPad.

I hear a LOT of people, who have not actually bought either an IPS screen nor an e-reader, speaking to the point that e-Ink is superior to LCD in terms of eye strain. Let me tell you, as someone who works under florescents for 9-10 hours a day staring at a cheap ass Dell LCD, then goes home to a dark room and stares at a far superior Acer LCD panel for several more hours on my PC, and when I'm feeling like something other than gaming, i sit on the bed in complete darkness reading ebooks of my wife's MacBook pro, often in 3-4 hour sessions.

I borrowed a kindle from a friend, and a Nook from another, for a week each, to see if I felt investing in a formal ebook reader was worth the $300-400 in cash plus the cost of non-portable proprietary DRM books. I spent just shy of 16 reading the kindle, and although i found the e-Ink to be quite nice in normal light, it was somewhat tough to read in bright sunlight, and the backlight quality with e-ink in a dark room made my eyes hurt after only an hour or so trying to read it. The Nook was superior in almost every way to the Kindle, and did better in daylight, but equally poor in a dark room. On one night, I managed to read the kindle in the dark for just about 4 hours, i don't think I could do that again...

Apparently, the majority of people complaining about LCD in dimply lit rooms complain about not being able to dim the screen far enough, and complain about the harsh light. First off, who told you to read black text off a white screen as an e-reader!?!? Change the background color to a deep set near-black, and the text to a soft contrast color. With a computer, or software based e-reader on an iPhone or iPad, that is completely under your control! There are also a number of very cheap screen protectors that filter excess backlight that leaks through parts of the screens and that greatly reduces "wash" in the display if your LCD is particularly susceptible to that (most LED IPS panels are not), but cheap LCDs can be.

I'm glad I had the chance to try both competing e-readers for extended periods. It absolutely confirmed I will never own an e-Ink device, at least not until there's one that fully supports open, unenctypted books, or provides a book sharing mechanism for DRM books from multiple outlets, and at the same time, costs less than $150. Also, it really needs a screen larger than 6". That's fine for text-only content if you have good vision, but for anything including graphics of any kind, or layouts of text (periodicals), anything less than 9" is too small.

I'm not jumping on an iPad immediately. I have 6 other things in front of it in my budget plan, including a new iMac 27" to replace an aging gaming PC, a new washing machine, furniture for my 2 year olds room, shelving in my garrage, and new couches in the living room... However, by Christmas at the latest, I'm sure I'll get around to getting an iPad.