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ASUS DR-900 e-reader hands-on

After weeks of hearing about the DR-900 (or DR-950) e-reader, you had to know that we'd sprint (okay, walk at a brisk pace) over to ASUS' booth to finally handle the touchscreen device in person. The 9-inch ebook reader was quite light in hand, and though we didn't have Amazon's Kindle DX with us, it appeared very comparable in size. As far as the reading experience goes, the preloaded text-based PDFs looked crisp on the 1024 x 768 display and as per usual the e-ink display took about a second or two to refresh. Unfortunately, here's where we tell you that the former touch experience was less than stellar -- we had to press quite hard to select the homescreen icons and light finger taps didn't register when we tried to type "engadget" into the address bar. We got the hang of having to press firmly, but we're happy there are the up and down arrows on the right edge for alternate navigation. Perhaps it will all be fixed up once it heads into production, though we don't have details on when that will be. What we do know is that there's a just lovely hands-on video for you after the break.
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