PUBLIC MARKS from wiredsetman with tags europe & review

Before I thrill you with my review the Patagonia Freightliner (pictured at right), a quick note about bias. You're going to notice that most of these reviews veer towards the positive. This is not because I am taking kickbacks, or because I am generally a very enthusiastic person, or because I fear that by criticizing others, I am opening the door to criticism of myself. The reason is that I put a serious amount of research--days worth, all told--into determining which items would function best on the road. I'm pleased to report that just about everything performed well above expectations, which is either an endorsement of my research skill, or, more likely, a testament to the constantly improving quality of stuff.

When the Sony Reader appeared on store shelves last September, it didn't make the kind of splash a lot of people expected, and in the months since it hasn't sent waves rippling through the industry. Tech reviewers were less than whelmed by the Readers feature set--no backlighting, no search, no annotation, no wireless web streaming--and they considered the price, $350, to be way too high. Literary types, on the other hand, dismissed the Reader in a rather haughtier manner. They saw it not only as a poor substitute for a book, but as a threat to the hallowed tradition of "the book," another broadside from the over-stimulated, attention-deprived, caffeinated present on the deep-thinking and ever-threatened literary tradition.