Now, after a week of usage, here are my findings:

• Don’t buy it if your room is really hot, because this small appliance will not improve the room’s temperature. I’ve use it with a big block of ice but the inside temperature remained absolutely the same. Not a single degree in minus. It just doesn’t cool the air.
• What this appliance really does, is to increase the level of humidity in the room. In my room the level of humidity was quite low, 37%, and thus the air felt very hot and dry. When this appliance started to work, the air became instantly fresh and pleasant. Although the real temperature wasn’t lowering, the body was feeling much better.

Some people say that this EAC is nothing more than an overpriced cooler, but they are wrong. A cooler doesn’t improve the level of air humidity (relative humidity). I would compare the evaporative air cooler’s effect with the effect of a waterfall in the mountains, in a warm, sunny day. I suppose that anyone has seen at least once in a lifetime such a waterfall, and knows how pleasant the air is around it.

So, in conclusion, if your needs are limited, you can try the evaporative air cooler. I would say, if the temperature in the room doesn’t go over 26-27° C / 78-79° F, and the humidity is low, you can give it a try.  Otherwise, buy an air conditioning – it’s better to be safe than sorry.

1. Why not a Kindle?

I searched and looked at a lot of Kindle reviews on Youtube and other video sharing websites, but since the recent discovery of Apple and Android security failures, I simply don’t trust anymore the big brands. I know that Kindle looks impressive, but the hidden marketing strategies that must be incorporated in it and the limitation of reading formats were enough and strong reasons for me to drop any choice regarding a Kindle purchase.

2. Why a Prestigio? What is Prestigio?

Prestigio is a brand originating from Cyprus. In fact, the parent brand is Asbis. Asbis is one of biggest IT hardware distributors in Eastern Europe and Prestigio is the brand-name for their e-readers and tablets. Most of their products are researched, developed and manufactured in China, but definitely not by any of the so many low-profile Chinese producers.

Currently, Prestigio sells three models featuring an e-ink display (I didn’t even bother to take into consideration buying an e-reader with TFT display – a tablet would be a better a choice if one needs to watch movies or color pictures). The low-end device is Prestigio PER3362, which costs around 100-125 euros and it is strictly an e-reading device, while the high-end device is PER5062 which has a touch-screen display, wi-fi connection, touch-screen keyboard and is sold for around 180-200 euros.

In between lays Prestigio PER5162 which looks much similar to Kindle 3 and is sold for around 150-170 euros. PER5162 has a 6” display, wifi connection and built-in mini-keyboard. Good to know, every Prestigio model, no matter the price, comes with a free leather cover and a pair of headsets, which are a very nice and useful add-on to the package.

PER5162 comes also with a 2Mb storage card.

3. Technicalities

There is little to be said about this e-reader. I think it is one of the best.

It can read the most popular formats: epub, fb2, pdf, doc, txt, rtf. When using the fb2 format, one can take notes and markups. The pdf reflow function is excellent, very convenient and it works smoothly. This e-reader can also reflow docs, but with long docs the processing time it’s much longer, so my suggestion is to save the docs as pdfs and only then put them on the e-reader.

The books can be organized in folders, with no matter how many levels in depth, for example “Authors – A” > “Aristotle”, “Authors – B” > “Bakunin”, “Baudelaire” etc. Thus, you can really organize an entire library into the card. The e-reader supports mini-SD cards up to 32 Gb.

Of course, the e-ink display makes it easy to read in plain light or in the sun. There is no screen reflection. The drawback of this technology is given by the fact that you cannot read without an external source of light.

The e-reader is very easy, it weights around 300 gr. including the leather cover. The buttons are very soft, but firmly. The main input control is a mini-joystick very similar to the joystick from PSP. I’m curious to see how long it will last, but it seems to be very solid.

The wi-fi and browser function is very convenient. The wi-fi receptor is very powerful, while the browser (a Linux browser) is excellent for basic tasks, such as checking emails or reading a newspaper frontpage. Of course, everything will be seen in black and white. However, from what I have seen in videos over Youtube, the Kindle’s web browser is more powerful. Luckily I don’t need it.

This e-reader also features two little games, a built-in radio, a photo viewer and an mp3 player. Honestly, I didn’t use so much these functions, but when I tested it looked ok. According to the specifications, you can read and in the same time listen to the radio or music player.

The reading options are very diverse. No matter the format, any document can be zoomed in and out (and there are at least 4 levels of zoom). The page can be fitted on the screen for the best reading experience. As stated before, with some documents, such as pdfs and docs, you can reflow the text, then zoom in and out until you have the best option. In the gallery, you can see a page from a pdf document, in initial mode, then in reflow mode (with the maximum zoom out level). As you can see, the reflowed text looks great and the page is much easier to read.

A notice about the gallery pictures: I did the pictures using the flash light. As you can see, the e-ink display looks exactly like a paper page. It doesn’t reflect light, it doesn’t “kill” your retina.

Although you close a book, the e-reader remembers your settings so the next time when you open that particular book, it will open exactly where you leaved it, and how you leaved it. All the reading activity is stored under the “History” menu.

I didn’t have until now any trouble with special Romanian characters, such as ş, ţ, â, î etc. I think that this e-reader can display virtually any european language. When taken out of the box, the storage card is filled with free books in a lot of languages, from English and German to Russian and Polish. I was curious to open one such book from every language, and I didn’t see any trouble.

There is also a voice reading option, but in my opinion this needs to be improved. There are only two languages, Chinese and English, and the English voice is quite dubious. When reading a literary work it really sounds bad. It works much better with journalistic texts.

4. Conclusions

Definitely, Prestigio PER5162b is one of the best e-ink e-readers currently on the market. It is a little bit more expensive than Kindle, but the package includes the leather cover and it reads virtually any e-book format. I’m highly recommending it.

As a final word I’m also recommending to download and install the firmware upgrade from the Prestigio’s website. It adds several options in the reading menus and solves some bugs with the wi-fi and the browser.

Later edit: other names / brands of this e-reader:

- Boeye G6 e-reader
- Delyca S600k

When we had to cope for the third  time in a row with such an incident, I decided to study the log files and I was amazed to discover that in the hours preceding every single incident the server was “attacked” from 3 IPs, coming from the same C-class: 216.104.15.* There were a lot of automated tools that were requesting non-existant pages from our website, by running into an infinite loop that was requesting something like this:

www…/list-services/js/functions.js
www…/list-services/js/js/functions.js
www…/list-services/js/js/js/functions.js

It was obvious that these requests were coming from some sort of search bot too stupid to understand the <base> tag.

Digging more into this, I discovered that this C-class pertains to Trend Micro, a shitty anti-virus producer. Then, searching more on Google, I found out that this shitty anti-virus installs on users’ computers a bullshit tool that “verifies” if/whether a website spreads malware or not. Unfortunately, their tool seems to be quite stupid, since it cannot correctly parse the HTML code of a page.

That’s why I decided to ban with .htaccess all the requests coming for the said C-class. And digging even more, I discovered that they are using a second class, too: 150.70.64.* and that a lot of people are starting to complain about them.

The key is to convert the movies to mp4 format and 177 x 144 size. That’s pretty ridiculous because the screen is huge, 320 x 240, and a movie which is 177 x 144 will become pixelated – but, at least, it will work.

The movies can be converted with the Super tool from Eright Soft: http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html

Now, a little bonus. In addition to the review I must say that I have discovered a new interesting function of this phone: call recording. Simply put, the phone can record any conversation you have. As far as I know, this is avoided by the other phone manufacturers because of privacy concerns. But the Sciphone works great as a mobile phone with recording facility.

Until recently I had never heard about this phone or brand: “Sciphone”. But in December ’09 I considered, finally, to upgrade from my old and trustful Nokia 3220. So I decided to look for a new phone.

I don’t wanted much from my new phone. Just to call and be called, to play music and movies as an Mp4 player and, if possible, to go online in urgent situations. On the other hand, I don’t give a shit on how other people see me, so I don’t care if they see me with a cheap phone. That’s why I started to look for a phone in the area of 100-125 euros with the following characteristics:

• able to function as an MP4 player
• able to support microSD (in order to play a lot of music)
• if possible, able to connect to the internet

When I was looking to buy my new phone, I found some sellers in my country that were aggressively marketing the “Sciphone” brand. This is a dual sim, quad band Iphone clone. The price was very good (around 450 RON, which means ~110 euros), it seemed that it contained all the functions that I needed, so I was tempted to buy one, but finally I gave up with this idea because:

• I didn’t found any reliable information about Sciphone SAR (level of radiations)
• I was aware that the price in China is less than a half of the price offered by the Romanian sellers
• I have read a lot of negative reviews: people said that the batteries were very bad, or that the software was incredibly buggy, and so on
• on Youtube there are a lot of movies with Sciphone I68 and Sciphone I9+++, but these movies are too much presentational

This is why finally I’ve decided to buy a Nokia 6303, which is an excellent phone – except the fact that the 2.2” screen is too little to comfortably play movies on it.

But at the end of April, I have received a newsletter from PayPal presenting some Chinese online sellers. One of them was Pandawill.com , an online store that features a lot of Sciphone phones. After carefully inspecting some models built around I68 model, I have decided to risk 56 USD and to buy a Sciphone I9+++ . This was on May 1st. To my surprise, by May 18th, the phone arrived in Romania.

So, I had the opportunity to use a Sciphone and now I’m ready to write my own review. I will organise it with pros and cons.

Sciphone I9+++ pros

• It’s a dual sim phone. This means that you can have 2 sims (different or same network) and receive calls or call with both. This is great when you use 2 different phones, or when you go with your wife in holiday and don’t want to use 2 phones and 2 chargers.
• I struggled with the GPRS settings, but finally I managed to correctly set the phone. Opera Mini 4.2 (generic version) works great and it is much more confortable than on Nokia 6303. I didn’t had the curiosity to test the built-in Chinese browser. On the reverse side, the speed of Opera Mini on Nokia seems to be a little bit faster.
• The gold battery is not so bad, but I observed that it’s better to charge it from the wall charger than from the laptop (through USB). With wall charger a full charge takes around 2h, but with USB charger the phone shows battery fully charged after only 1/2 hours – which is false and can trick you. If used only for calls, and not very intensive (let’s say 15 minutes a day) the gold battery easily lasts 3 days, which is not so bad.
• Both Windows XP and Windows 7 recognized the phone when plugged-in. Windows will read Sciphone as “MT6225 device” and it is very easy to transfer files between the phone and the computer.
• The touch screen works fine so far. I have never had a touch screen phone, and I will never pay more than 100 euros for one such phone, but I have a Fujitsu Siemens Pocket LOOX N560 so I know what a touch screen should be able to do. Sciphone’s touch screen is very responsive, and it’s even better if you calibrate it.
• It plays some Java applications. Not every Java application, but I was interested to have Opera Mini – and this plays well.
• The Bluetooth function is very, very nice. You can use the Sciphone as a remote control over your desktop (or laptop)  computer and even your  PDA. Very useful if you want to impress an audience.
• It costs only 56 USD, unlocked. Even if we count shipping and eventually VAT charges, price doesn’t go over 75 USD. This is a very good value, in my opinion. This price cannot be beaten!

Sciphone I9+++ cons

• Movies: I have never managed to play any single movie, except the movies taken by the built-in camera. Firstly, I downloaded some MP4s from Google Video. Nokia 6303 has no problem in playing these movies. But Sciphone wasn’t so friendly. Then I tried to re-encode the movies with different options, but with no success. I finally gave up. This is not good.
• The built-in camera’s quality is awful. It reminds me the Nokia 3220′s camera. Don’t expect to take artistic pictures or movies with it, however it’s very useful when you only need to take an informal picture. And some people say that it can be used as webcam, too (I didn’t tried, but it seems so).
• The music player doesn’t read folders, so if you want to organize music files as albums / artists etc. , you can’t. All the music files must stay in the same folder on the MicroSD card. However, I think that one can organize his/hers music in play lists. Which is not, however, very comfortable. My Nokia 6303 organizes itself all the music and can recognize artists and albums.
• The same for the pictures. The pictures must stay in the same folder.
• The files cannot be organized and thus important settings will stay forever well hidden. For example you’ll have to digg after the missed calls (CALLS > SIM CALL HISTORY > MISSED CALLS). If you missed a call the Sciphone doesn’t display a message on frontpage.
• We don’t know anything about SAR value. Taking into account that 90% of the world phones are manufactured in China (at least the components) I suspect that SAR values for this Sciphone are ok, however it would be nice to have some official information, especially taking into account that this is a dual sim phone – and concerns are double.
• It doesn’t have a built in email application. Nokia 6303 has. However, if needed, one can use Opera Mini.
• It doesn’t  have an official pc-suite. It does have, however, some kind of “unofficial” Phone Suite that seems reliable enough.

In short, I’m happy with the choice that I’ve made in December – purchasing a Nokia 6303 instead of Sciphone I68/I9+. Nokia 6303 is a much more multimedia oriented phone and it is very friendly with music lovers. I have nor time, neither disposition to add my music files to playlists or to discover the correct MP4 codec in order to make the Sciphone to work well. However the Sciphone will be definitely used  as a “family”  phone when I’ll be abroad – with my SIM and my wife’s SIM on it. The dual-sim function is very convenient and you can definitely take advantage of it in a lot of situations.