review on Arunrocks

Atari and Gaming History

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 18:54:02 +0530

Imagine your 8 year old cousin, who is learning to use computers, asking you about the Save icon on Microsoft Word. The image of a floppy disk is almost universally used to denote ‘saving a file’. But with floppy disks gone, would the coming generation understand the symbolism?


I had the same problem with the joystick icon commonly used to denote Games. Typically it is drawn as a stick pointing up, protruding from a box. Most of the consoles that I was familiar with had much more elaborate game controllers or gamepads. However this simple black-coloured gaming device remained a mystery to me.

Until I read the book ['Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System'][book] that is. I started reading this book out of curiosity and due to a certain interest in gaming history. But soon realised that it is a must-read for anyone interested in Game design or even the roots of Gaming culture. It covers not just the historical context of the Atari VCS and its popular games but some of its nearly impossible technical constraints.

[book]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/026201257X/?ie=UTF8&tag=arunrocks-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B0015UC17E

One of the most amazing thing about Atari games were that they could use only 128 **bytes** of RAM. Yes you read that right. It is not Megabytes or even Kilobytes, I mean Bytes. To give you a better idea, I have italicised the first 128 characters at the beginning of this blog post. Yes, it is that small.

![Atari Flashback](/static/images/blog/atari-flashback.jpg)

To program an entire game with graphics, sounds and gameplay with several levels would seem impossible given such constrains. But remember that RAM refers to the working memory or the read-write area. Atari would store most of the game content in removable cartridges containing about 4 kB of ROM or Read Only Memory. Now, 4 kB is not much either. Today, even the smallest images, say an icon, would be bigger than that. Imagining packing an entire game in that space. Incredibly cool!

Constraints bring out some of the most creative solutions. There could be no better example of this than Atari games. Not only were Atari games enjoyed by millions of gamers, they also boast of many pioneering achievements. The 1979 game _Adventure_ is considered to be the first action-adventure game. One of the great grandfathers of games like _Warcraft_, the game allowed the player to explore multiple rooms with the ability to pick up, carry or drop items, a first at that point in time. It was also the first game to have a widely known 'Easter Egg.' 

_Yar's Revenge_, released in 1981, takes place in space and uses game code as game data. Taking place in space, the game screen is dominated by a striped randomly coloured neutral zone. Rather than use a random number generator, the game's creator brilliantly converted the game's own binary code into a psuedo-random pattern, saving precious ROM space. In other words, you are looking into the game's own code while playing the game. How many games have you played that can claim that?

Not all firsts mentioned in the book are technical innovations. It narrates how Atari employees broke off to start Activision, the first third party video game company. Of course, Atari's first game _Pong_ was a cultural phenomenon. Atari is also considered as the longest living game console spanning a duration of **14 years and 2 months** in US gaming history.

As a side note, if you have read [Steve Job's autobiography][steve] then you must be aware that Steve Jobs was Atari's fortieth employee. He was a technician paid at $5/hour. They sent him to India to help him do 'spiritual research'. Later it was their $100 bounty for each chip removed from the design of _Breakout_ that triggered Jobs to reach out to Steve Wozniak. Interestingly, they eventually offered Apple II to Atari and they were not interested. Imagine that, Atari could have actually bought Apple!

Today, one can still buy [Atari Flashback][flashback], a successor of the original Atarai 2600. It contains two of the iconic joysticks bearing a close resemblance to the original joysticks. There are many recent accounts of parents [rediscovering][rediscover] such legacy arcades. Small children don't seem to mind the simple graphics thanks to their active imagination. Adults also love the competitiveness of two-player games.

Sometimes to better understand the present, one needs to dive into the past. Knowing Atari's past was not only instructive but also inspiring.

[steve]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1451648537/
[flashback]: http://www.legacyengineer.com/storefront/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=124 
[rediscover]: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/04/rediscovering-arcade-nostalgia.html

The Jobs Biography

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 03:04:35 +0530

After I finished reading the last page of Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography yesterday, I heaved a sigh of relief. The experience of reading was like getting intimate with an extraordinary genius who had a highly abrasive personality. We get to meet a young billionaire who either insulted people on their face or highly praised them. This arrogance has less to do with his wealth and more with the rebellious and artistic side of his personality.

The extraordinary thing about his life is that despite several close calls with death, he never mellowed down and accepted status quo. Wherever he saw imperfections, be it badly designed products or inefficiently run businesses, he tried to change them, often radically. When most people would try to shrug off saying ‘Well, nobody seems to have a better way of doing this’, Jobs turned the question around and reduced it to simplistic solution, making you wonder, ‘That is so obvious. Why didn’t I think of it first?’.

Though we don’t get much insight into Job’s process of simplification, it certainly took several rounds of iterations and rework till he was satisfied. He would rather abandon months of effort than ship something that was not intuitively perfect as in the case of completely redesigning the iPhone’s glass face. He believed in producing products that met his high personal standards and led to his personal satisfaction. In contrast, while other CEOs were trying to please the market by somehow meeting customer expectations, Jobs completely ignored what they think they want and followed his instinct. This explains the tremendous passion he invested in building them and defending them no matter what the circumstances. Unlike any CEO, he could talk about his products at the highest level and quickly zoom into the minutest detail without batting an eyelid.

We also get to know Apple and Pixar - two great companies that are not just innovative but have had tremendous cultural impact. Some of the interesting characteristics that explains their success are:

Collaboration: Pixar’s building is marked by a large central atrium that facilitates collaboration by literally bumping into people. At Apple, various business unit heads have long meetings every week and take decisions by discussing every detail even at early stages.
Questioning: Jobs loved to argue and obsess over every detail with everyone. It was not just a matter of convincing him as much as demonstrating that you have really explored the problem from every angle.
Passion: Like its customers, Apple’s employees truly believed in building something ‘world changing’ and this made them stretch themselves to limits, unlike other companies.

In short, the book is a great read as it doesn’t try to glorify Jobs. It tries to give an objective and well-researched account of a technology legend. Highly recommended.

Sony Bravia CX 420 and a Guide to Flat-panel TVs

Sun, 16 Oct 2011 14:53:00 +0530

It is Diwali time and the retail shopping excitement in India is comparable to Christmas season in the West. Everyone seems to be praying for their old and fat CRT TV to stop working, so that they have an excuse to buy a brand new flat screen TV.

We were on the lookout for a flat screen LCD TV sometime back and deliberated various brands for a while. Actually, for me every gadget purchase takes ‘a while’ due to the amount of research I generally do. Since, I do not watch TV regularly, I had to practically learn all the TV jargon from scratch to understand the sales-speak.

After a month of ‘superficial research’, some of the elementary findings were:

The old CRT TV is completely out of the market. You might be able to find, at best, a 21" CRT TV.
There are no plasma TVs in the 32" category. They only come in bigger sizes and guzzle a lot of power.
The market leader in Indian TV market is Samsung followed by LG. The Koreans also dominate the world market this way with low cost yet high quality TV sets.
LED screens today are a gimmick. It’s just LED backlighting and true LED TVs are a few years away from an average consumer’s reach. Their saturated colors in the showroom is just clever tweaking.
32" is a reasonably large screen for our apartment living room. Any bigger and you will feel you are literally inside the screen. (This is subjective, of course)
The higher end TVs have higher frame rates for sports action. This is called by different manufacturers by different names such as Tru Motion or Flo motion. This is very annoying while watching movies as it makes them look like TV serials. This might not be perceptible to many, but personally I couldn’t watch my favourite movies being ‘interpolated’ this way
HD Ready (720p) would be cheaper than Full HD (1080p), but they will be obsolete soon. Interestingly for screens smaller than 36", the difference in picture quality is not quite evident but to the trained eye.
In most modern TVs, there is no need for a DVD or bluray player if you prefer to keep movies in your pen drive or hard disk. You can simply plug in the device directly to your TV set. The TV presents a file browser and you can play the video if the file format is supported.
No comments on 3D TV as it was not a requirement for us.

All these facts were gathered after multiple visits to various showrooms and from the Internet. Initially I had visited a couple of stores in April this year and found out that, among the leading brands, only LG offered IPS displays at that point in time. Now, I know a thing or two about IPS displays because it is the same display technology used on Apple Cinema displays and even the iPhones.

IPS displays have the widest viewing angles and excellent color reproduction. In fact, I was so impressed by IPS displays that I bought a 23" DELL IPS monitor specifically for desktop use. Hence, I was almost certain to buy an LG.

Around May, LG and most leading brands did a refresh of their lineup of TV screens (i.e. 2011 models). LG no longer offered IPS displays for their 32 inch screens. This was extremely disappointing as this meant that I have to visit the stores again to view and reevaluate the sets.

Visits to the nearest Samsung and LG showrooms resulted in quite a bit of disappointment. Their 32" LCD models were a shadow of their predecessors. The color reproduction was weak or dull. The sound appeared to come out of a closed box. The sales representatives were not very clear in explaining these “improvements” such as why LG decided to abandon the IPS display. I was even tempted to buy an older CRT instead!

We then visited the Girias outlet near our apartment, from where we have made most of our purchases. The sales representative was quite patient and knowledgeable. He explained that the non-IPS displays like Twisted nematic (TN) have been improving in the past couple of years and the color reproduction was almost at par. We were able to visually compare the viewing angles and experience this for ourselves.

When I explained to him that I found the LG and Samsung audio and video quality as being not satisfactory, he demoed a Sony Bravia model - CX 420. Now, personally, I detest the Sony brand due to their tendency to create their own standards like the Memory stick, Betamax and UMD. Also, they charge premium rates for the same feature set simply due their brand name (in laptops, for instance). Besides the number 420 does ring a bell in India :)

But I was genuinely surprised when the model actually had significantly better picture quality, color reproduction and excellent sound (with bass) for a price premium of 3K compared to other brands. However, the most impressive feature was the wide variety of video and audio formats that was supported out of the box. Even today there are TVs that can support pen drives but not harddisks; or ones that can play .avi but cannot open .mkv videos. But the 420 could play virtually any type of file lying in my harddisk except for videos with 5.1 channel audio tracks (because, duh, it had only 2 speakers).

So we finally settled on a Sony. Once home, we wall-mounted the unit and now its almost like a colourful window in the living room :).

Sony Bravia CX 420 - a Post-purchase review

What follows is a review of the TV written after 5 months of use. It goes into greater detail regarding some of the aspects covered earlier.

Unpacking / Appearance

Unlike the good old dabba TVs, today’s TV boxes can be carried by one person. The box contains a stand if you are mounting on a flat surface. The assembly takes about 10 mins and the printed instructions are quite clear. Wall mounting would need additional screws so it’s best that you ask the Sony personnel to wall-mount at no additional cost.

The TV is a classy all-black model with a slightly glossy bevel. However the screen is, thankfully, matte. So a mirror-like reflection will not be present from various light sources in your living room. The steroe speakers are located at the bottom. The remote is quite long and slender. It is quite easy to hold and the button are well spaced out.

Picture Quality

The Bravia series models use Live Color technology which makes pictures more vivid without making them unnaturally over saturated. This combined with various noise reduction techniques makes watching non-HD content such as Cable TV channels quite enjoyable. The picture is also intelligently resized to stetch the entire HD screen without letterboxing.

The color reproduction of HD videos is similarly quite superior to comparable brands (we did spend a lot of time in the showroom comparing this aspect alone :) ). However, Sony leaves very little room for tweaking by giving you only 4-5 preset modes like Theatre, Sports etc. Other brands might give you more parameters to fiddle with.

The viewing angle was quite good considering that it is not an IPS display. However, the difference in vertical viewing angles seemed to vary quite a bit. Hence, it might be a factor to consider while determining the height to wall mount the set.

There is a noticeable blur while taking photographs of the videos being played back. Hence it may or may not be the best choice for watching sports. I don’t watch much sports anyways.

Sound Quality

As mentioned earlier, I was not interested in connecting an external sound system like a home theatre system to the set. Hence, I was keen on a model that had good built-in sound. Compared to LG or Samsung, Sony sets seemed to have good sound reproduction even at high volumes without distortion.

The bass enhancing technology was not very effective but it did give sufficient bass to enjoy action movies. The stereo separation is not that great considering that both speakers fire downward, but it is definitely there!

Summary

Overall, we are quite happy with the purchase, though we realise that our needs were quite limited to start off with. Interestingly, we found ourselves spending more time watching movies from the hard-disks (yes plural, I have quite a collection :) ) rather than watching boring television programmes. I am yet to connect my Android phone which has a mini-HDMI output to the TV yet, but I hear that it’s an excellent idea.

Couldn’t be happier!

Rockstar Soundtrack - First Impressions

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 19:46:21 +0530

Warning: May contain traces of satire and humour

This is, unfortunately, an unpaid review. Hence, most of what’s written here is not made up. This can be very disappointing to some of you who read mainstream media, so please take it slowly. Media is after all a business and a source of bread and butter for many people. And bread and butter is definitely expensive, especially in India.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not the unbiased vigilante blogger. In fact, I tried my best to get paid for this music review. Apparently, Rockstar’s PR was not in a mood to humor a small-time blogger like me. Completely unfair, since being fond of Rehman’s music I would have written a pretty nice review anyways!

So, this review wouldn’t be too nice. Because it is written for free. So Mr. Cheapstakes, you can wipe that mocking smirk off your face. Let’s have a look at Rockstar’s playlist:

Jo Bhi Mein - Mohit Chauhan

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah… I can this one sing too. Have to appreciate the sense of humour of the lyricist Irshad Kamil (even better than me in this regard). The album starts with the ‘Rockstar’ yelling ‘Oh yeah, yeah’ and the audience, accepting the challenge, yells it back. This goes back and forth till you can guess who wins in the end (Hint: it’s the guy with the mic).

The song is heavily set on guitar strings and the mimicry abilities of the singer (cost-cutting measures?), while it introduces you to the apparently always-misunderstood-protagonist. You cannot imagine someone better than Mohit rendering this rock-pop composition. The song immerses yourself into a rock concert minus the sweaty t-shirts.

Kateya Karun - Harshdeep Kaur & Sapna Awasthi

Can music tickle your ears till you smile? Yes it can. Listen to this one. Not sure what vodoo music engineering that Rehman employs but the opening of this track is a quirky yet hilarious stereo experience. It is great for testing your new 200 buck earphones and be unjustifiably happy about it too. How do I know that you have cheap earphones? You are reading a free review, aren’t you?

Countless Punjabi Bollywood numbers have been created filled with ‘Ahuns’, ‘Oyes’ and ‘Brrrrraaahs’. So what makes this one different? Glad that you are wondering the same thing as I did. Funny, how that works. I guess it has to do with the innocent naughtiness in the lyrics and an equally fun rendering by Harshdeep.

This song made me wonder why I like Rehman’s music. I realised that it’s because I understand what he is trying to convey through his music. To my musically untrained ears, when he foreshadows the ending of the track with deescalating string chords I anticipate that we are slipping into a dream. Ending on that dreamy note, I believe that the entire song is a roller-coaster ride suited for a coming-of-age situation.

Phir Se Ud Chala - Mohit Chauhan

There he goes up again… well, that’s what the song’s title literally means. I am not sure what he does up there but I guess it’s an occupational hazard with rockstars. They are high up there all the time. So probably that’s what this trippy, trancy song is all about. Not bad for, emmm… those meditative moments.

Saadda Haq - Mohit Chauhan

This the song that screamed from the top of our set-top boxes. The lines that were intentionally strong to create that intentionally strong effect. The song that was set to be the youth anthem. Except it didn’t.

Saadda turned too saada in the wake of dozens of oh-so-anguished-wanna-be rock songs preceded it. Every producer wanted to cash in on the rock-craze, I guess. Hence to the DK-Bose generation the impassioned lyrics might sound a bit… tame? However, it does stand apart from the recent rock ballads with Mohit’s raw energy. Oh yes, there is that signature “Oh yeah” all over again.

Kun Fayakun - A.R.Rahman, Javed Ali & Mohit Chauhan

How many hit sufi-style devotional songs can Rehman create? Unlimited, apparently. Like a crazy fan, we fall completely in love with the soulful music and philosophical lines sung by Rehman and team. BTW, why is Mohit in every song? Is Mohit - the ‘Rockstar’?

Sheher Mein - Mohit Chauhan, Karthik

Enjoyed this parody of a typical dhink-chak Bollywood number complete with a sleazy producer interrupting from time to time. It’s a literal slap in the face by Imtiaz’s team on the crass commercialisation of the music industry that adds masala catering to every demographic, suggestive lyrics for the controversy factor and catchy jingles for higher ringtone sales.

Thoroughly enjoyed the entire track where you can hear a toned-down mushy Mohit, who breaks out in the interludes to his wild raw form. This song would probably show the inner turmoil of a rebel artist bending backwards just to pay his bills. The result is fantastically comical.

Hava Hava - Mohit Chauhan, Viviane, Tanvi, Suvi Suresh, Shalini

Ever happened that you had to listen to a foot-tapping Middle-eastern number with all the cheering and clapping, but never managed to understand a word of why or what they are so happy about? Ever tried to fill-in the words with an imaginary storyline of why they are so happy? Come on, you must definitely have. That’s exactly what is happening in this track.

Beware though, the enthusiasm in this track in highly infectious. When you set to listen to this on your 5.1 home theatre speaker, it’s likely that you would have gotten up and started dancing in Turkish folk steps. Possibly, your neighbour would be also doing the exact same thing.

Aur Ho - Mohit Chauhan, Alma Ferovic

This is a song that takes itself too seriously. It talks of breakups and sadness. Apparently, there is a certain following for such songs. They love the ‘depth of emotions’ in such numbers. Sorry folks, this isn’t really my cuppa here.

Tango For Taj - Theme

Reminding you of the background scores of late-seventies movies like Bobby or even tamil movies like Mouna Raagam, this instrumental score carries an endearing nostalgia about it. However the Turkish dance troupe (whom we met a few songs back) gate-crashes into the party. From then on, as you can guess, it’s all clapping and cheering. Gotta hate their cheeky enthusiasm for that.

Tum Ko - Kavita Subamaniam

Finally! A song without Mohit! I was beginning to wonder if there is one. This is one of those so beautifully rendered female numbers that draws you in completely. Rehman has done this before, most recently, with Sherya’s Mannipaya. In that song, the apology rendered by her is so touching that you end up weeping at her feet, pleading forgiveness. Ok, who was apologising again?

The Dichotomy of Fame - Ft.Balesh on Shehnai, Kabuli on Guitars

A fusion of Indian shehnai, middle-eastern strings and western violins is all I can say. Yes, I am beginning to get lazy with this review thing. Did I mention that I wasn’t paid?

Naadaan Parindey - A.R.Rahman, Mohit Chauhan

A mellowed down rock song where Rehman’s voice is surprisingly soothing.

Tum Ho - Mohit Chauhan, Suzanne D Mello

The male version of Kavitha’s song. Not as exceptionally good, but great for long-drives nonetheless!

The Meeting Place - Ranbir Kapoor

Ok, this is not even a song. I am definitely not reviewing this one!

It’s risky to write about first impressions for Rehman’s creations. His music tends to grow on you on repeated hearings. Time to stop the tape and rewind. Maybe I will change my mind and be nicer.

BTW, you are welcome.

The Real Endhiran Review

Fri, 08 Oct 2010 04:49:42 +0530

This review has spoilers

Saw Endhiran yesterday in a theatre full of people many of whom didn’t even understand Tamil (you know, when they laugh only at the jokes in English!) It was a wonderful experience, minus all the wolf whistles and dancing seen in a typical Rajini starrer film. Partially due to the fact that it is a relatively tame multiplex audience in Karnataka and partially because it was not a typical Rajini movie with cliched punchlines and mannerism. Instead, it was a good Indian sci-fi movie.

Even though the theme is as old as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Endhiran shows the complexities that a sentient android robot, if ever built, brings in a form understandable even to the masses. It is a genuine attempt at bringing the moral issues of advancing AI technologies and how it can possibly impact our lives. The story or plot is rather an excuse to put together various engaging scenes and brings nothing entirely novel.

To say that Shankar has left enough interesting bits and pieces for the above-average audience would be an understatement. More on that later. I was expecting to a visual effects driven blockbuster movie and was instead surprised by the science fiction aspects of it. There is a lot of detail in the manner the robot manoeuvres i.e. magnetic attraction rather than dumb jet-packs.

The rest of the review has even more spoilers

The Geeky bits

As alluded previously, the movie is sprinkled with plenty of geeky stuff. The problems posed are really hard problems from the fields of machine learning and AI research rather than gimmicky questions. This shows the kind of homework that Shankar (or is it Sujatha?) has done for the movie.

Here is a sample of what the “Robot” can deftly handle and some other geek trivia:

Hard AI and machine learning problems

Hard Robotics problems

Bi-pedal motion
Accurate speech synthesis

Hard Math problems

Largest prime number
Determining if a large number is Fibonacci

Computer Programming

Hello World!
Worms for infiltration of a network rather than a Virus (Take that Hollywood!)

Science Fiction References

Asimov’s Laws of Robotics - The scientist has a clever explanation why it doesn’t follow them. Otherwise this would have ruined the plot.(Thanks Rindo!)
Various Star Wars droids - R2-D2 anyone?

Kudos to the Endhiran team for the laudable attempt.

PS: I wasn’t too far off :)

Infibeam Pi - My experiences with an Ebook Reader

Sat, 11 Sep 2010 07:33:47 +0530

Early adopter: An early adopter is a person who embraces new technology before most other people do. Early adopters tend to buy or try out new hardware items and programs, and new versions of existing programs, sooner than most of their peers. According to a theory called Diffusion of Innovations (DoI) formulated by Everett Rogers, early adopters make up 13.5 percent of the population – Johns Hopkins Inst.

I am not an early adopter when it comes to gadgets. But ever since Kindle was introduced, it was pretty clear to me that I am going to buy an Ebook reader. For me, moving around books has been always a problem. Moreover, I am allergetic to old print.

Three months back, close to my birthday, I ordered an Infibeam Pi ebook reader. At that point of time, for ten thousand rupees, it was considerably cheaper than Kindle in India. Also, I did not like the idea of Amazon playing “Big Brother” where your book collection was stored in the “cloud” and subject to the mercy of their deletion policies. Pi didn’t have features that I didn’t need and it had some which I felt were missing in Kindle. More on this later.

Three months later, I would make the bold assertion that Ebook readers are the future. For a voracious reader, it is a must-have and with falling prices, it will replace paper books almost completely. I would expect students to be the most evident benefactors making it unnecessary to carry heavy textbooks and allowing even remote locations to have a wider collection of books than ever before.

In case you are interested in a detailed review of Pi reader, read on…

First Impressions

The package arrived in two weeks with several friendly calls reminding me that the package is “on its way”. When it arrived, I was happy to find that Infibeam has invested quite some time and effort to make the packaging attractive and safe for transit.

What surprised me upon opening was that the Pi logo on the screen. At first I assumed that it’s a decal or a sticker. But it seems the screen is always ‘on’ in a standby state! This shows how little power it consumes while displaying a static image/text. The only power consumption that happens is when the display changes. The display change takes around half a second of flicker. But this is not as annoying as it sounds and one quickly gets used to it, like turning the pages of a book.

In terms of appearance, the closest I can say is that Pi is like holding a piece of unwrapped white Milky Bar. Except that it is one giant booksized flat smooth chunk. It is thinner than most phones and being light quite easy to hold. There is a silver four way directional pad at the bottom right, which is similar those found in most phones. Most of the other keys are on the left leaving the bottom part mostly vacant and underutilized.

Interface

The user interface is excellent with big bold icons. You don’t need a manual to understand most of its functions. Again, this was real surprise for me for an Indian product.

In terms of features, it has a music player and a sudoku game built in. Playing music can reduce the battery life considerably. It supports the EPUB format which is an open ebook format popularly used for the iPad. It also recognises Kindle’s (.mobi) book format, PDF, RTF, HTML and even most images. The latter makes it really a great option for reading comics (with smaller page sizes) even thought it will appear in greyscale.

The most common question I hear is - How good is it for PDFs? The answer is - it depends. If the PDF is mostly text, then it can reflow the text and handle the zooming of text pretty well. If the PDF is mostly images or scanned text (without OCR), then it would not look that great when you zoom. This is a deal breaker if you are going to read a lot of technical books for e.g. programming books or mathematical works. It is perfectly fine for general reading and comics.

Use cases

I have found myself reading a lot more due to the Pi reader. In fact there are many situations where Pi’s long battery life and portability came handy. Here are some such scenarios I could think of:

Extended Power cuts: The reader can last you days not just hours on a single charge
Documentation: Learning a lot of project docs
Students: As mentioned earlier this an excellent device for a student with lots of ebooks.
Clean Desks: You can keep reading multiple papers without the mess on your desk
Travel Companion: A lightweight companion in your laptop bag carrying thousands of must-reads
Comic Geek: Reading comic series compilations at a stretch

Ebook formats

There has been quite a bit of discussion around ebook formats like ePub or Kindle’s mobi. If you are a normal user who would directly download books from Infibeam/Amazon, read them and forget about it, then you can skip this section. On the other hand if you are a geek, who prefers ogg over mp3 or vice versa, then you might have many questions. Like which is ebook format is the most open, whether these formats are easily interconvertable etc.

EPUB is the likely future standard than mobi. Kindles cannot open EPUBs, which has resulted in many holding back their buy decision. EPUB is the most open format; it’s basically a zip file with xhtml and images. Just unzip and read with a browser! Even Google has recently offered over a million free e-books in EPUB format.

EPUB supports features like table of contents which is very useful for longer texts. EPUB allows for “richer” formatting. You can, for example, have things like “drop caps”, pictures with text that “flows” around them, or embedded fonts, none of which Mobi supports.

Personally, I have converted most of my ebooks into EPUBs. Using a tool called Calibre it is quite easy to convert from and to ebook formats.

PROs and CONs

Of course, the Pi reader could be better, a lot better. Here is a quick list of things that I feel are its pros and cons:

Pros

EPUBs: Supports EPUB quite well. In fact, the reading experience of EPUBs is the best compared to all other formats on Pi (even better than .TXT!).
Pages Numbering: Page numbers are maintained as in a real book. Good for teaching
Screen: The screen is the same Eink technology as the Kindle. For people who are lusting after iPads need to see this screen- you cannot make out the pixels. It is really gorgeous!
SD Card Support: Infibeam has both internal memory as well as swappable SD card support. SD cards are cheap and keep getting cheaper. You’d never run out of space.
Indian Languages: Lots of Indian language books at Infibeam bookstore
Battery life: Once charged, thanks to my occasional use of 1-2 hrs per day, it lasted two months! The lack of WiFi probably helps in this case.

Cons

Need for PC: It’s not a standalone device. You need your PC to add books or a friendly neighbourhood geek.
Illumination: Recommended to use under plenty of light. Opposed to iPad’s or Laptop’s glossy surface which works best in the dark. This one is best read near a window or under a tubelight, just like a book.
Button Placement: Back button made more accessible, say upper right would have avoided a lot of fumbling around. It’s awkwardly placed at the side.
Headphones Incompatible 3 mm earphone jack is not compatible with your favourite headphones
No Dictionary
No net browsing With a screen that takes half a second to refresh I am not sure if its the best device for browsing. Kindle comes with an experimental browser. But with spotty wifi in India, I’m not sure how much you would miss this feature.
Contrast: The contrast could be slightly better. The grey background reminds you of a filter-paper-like texture of a paperback, but the gorgeous typefaces conveys its classy pedigree.
Auto rotate - No auto-rotate based on gyroscope like iPad. Won’t this be annoying? I’m not sure.
Lack of Color or Touch Display - This is a limitation of all ebook readers. I miss color only while reading comics. Touch screen is a nice to have.
No full keyboard - A full keyboard is useful if you want to make notes, annotations or searches. Personally, I won’t find much use for it.
Oversmart .txt Handling: If you open text files esp from Gutenberg.org, the reader tries to identify headings and quotations. This sometimes goes wayward resulting in multiple sized fonts. There should be an option to disable this “intelligence”.
Cheap Cover: The Infibeam comes with a faux leather cover that is sturdy but uses a cheaper felt on the inside. The reader often slides out while reading within the cover. But it can be easily secured with a double sided tape :)

Summary

Ebook readers are great devices. Infibeam Pi is an excellent device for its stated features. If the prices came down like the Kindle, there would be a lot more adoption in India.

Gallery

Here are some photos of Pi reader (visit the Flickr page for higher resolution shots with captions):