Rating: 
Summary: Please do not buy this product
Review: I am giving 1 star because there is not 0. The device requires you to install the OS EVERY TIME THE BATERIES ARE RUNNING LOW. The worst the batteries only last for a week, even if you are not using the eBookam. In addition, there is no way to charge the batteries without removing them from the EBookman. You will get more support if you talk to your plants than the support privided by Franklyn.
You will do it better with a pen and a piece of paper.
Rating: 
Summary: Good for the price.
Review: I bought it on clearance ... So far I love it. The screen is decent, could be better, but it is backlit for night use. I found a good version of the KJ bible, some other free books from the franklin site. I also found a nice little editor to create text files, a solitare game and a Majongg game. I even found a site that had an interpeter for the old infocom games. For what I want an EBook reader and simple PDA features (address book, Memos and calendar) it works great. Also the text editor I downloaded is nice. I do some freelance writing on the side and it's nice to be able to use the editor to take some notes, then pull those over to the PC and use them. I also found a Linux Synch program so it can be used on that OS as well. I was trying to stay in a budget, but if you can afford it I would recomend the 911 with 16 meg. The 901 is decent I have everything on it (I did delete the stalagmite game that came on it) plus a KJ bible both testaments, Tapwrite, Solitare, Majongg, Princess of Mars (ebook) and 6 or 7 text files I created myself. I have 1268K free. Both readers have thier good and bad points. Good thing is you can find e-books for both. 'Princess of Mars' is in Mobi format (Which can also read Palm Doc) and the bible is in Franklin. One nice thing about the Franklin reader is that you can tell it to use Landscape so you have wider screen to use for reading. The screen is bigger than your low end Palm Zires. For the money It can't be beat. I am going to get a card for it so I can move the books and some of the apps and free up memory, but even with 8 meg it handles all my basic needs. I haven't tried the audible books or MP3 player options, but I really did'nt buy it for that. The bonus pack is nice It has a cradle, 3 spare stylus a power adapter and other various things. For ... the original price, you MIGHT be better off with a 16 meg Zire, but if you can get it on sale it's more than worth the money. One thing to be aware of is that when you change the batteries you need to have it connected to a PC or the AC adaptor, because there is no backup battery. If it is not connected to a powered device you will loose everything in memory once you take the
batteries out. I have been getting almost 2 weeks on a pair of batteries, depending on use.
Rating:
Summary: It is a GREAT device, if you know how to use it
Review: I bought my EBM-901 a few days back and it is better than I thought.
Positives:
1) Light and compact. Easy to carry.
2) Very Easy to set up once you read the manual.
3) Great UI, easy to use.
4) Backlit display is a great feature.
5) MP3 player and ebook reader, TO-DO list, address book and calendar. Negatives:
1) Less memory for your content(just 3MB after you install the OS and other meaningful software)
2) Backlight makes a weird sound when used(very low but can be heard at night when it is quiet).
3) Consumes batteries like a monstor. I knew all these problems(except 2) before I bought the device. I was alo prepared to invest to upgrade to 64 MB and buy rechargable batteries. So now I have a great book reading device and MP3 player that I use everywhere.
Rating:
Summary: Great Value and Impressive Features
Review: I bought the Ebookman 901 without knowing anything about it, and I have been very pleasantly surprised at how versatile it is. Just add a 128 MB MMC card (which are now pretty reasonable on E-bay) and you can have 2 hours of music to go! I have another 64 MB MMC card in it on which I have all the books I have downloaded. A 64 MB card will hold almost 100 regular books! The MobiPocket Reader is great for casual reading, and the Franklin Reader has all the navigation features to make it great for references. I can read any book in HTML or TXT format, and there are thousands for free on the web. The Ebookman also has some nice accessories like a car stereo adaptor and an AC adaptor for home use. The PDA functions like Address Book and Memo Book and Date Book are very handy. There are some really fun games. I take this unit when I am traveling, and am never bored. I think if you read the manual and learn how to use it properly, you will love this device. And now you can find them on E-bay and Heartland America for less than 50 bucks. WOW!
Rating: 
Summary: I also love my eBookman.
Review: I bought the eBookMan for reading books, not for PDA functions or an mp3 player. If I wanted that stuff I would have bought a PDA or mp3 player. Having them in the EBM is just a bonus that I don't take advantage of. That said, this is a great device for reading ebooks! I can see several common complaints so this device probably isn't for someone who isn't very tech-savvy. True, the documentation is sparse and you have to download the OS(what a bonus though, you get the latest OS and applications!) but it's not terribly difficult. Some people have problems losing everything when they change the batteries and I had this problem also. One call to Franklin support and they sent me a new eBookMan to replace my old one. The new one did not have the same problem. The battery life is fairly short but NiMH rechargables while on the go and using an AC adapter while at home keeps you from going through tons of batteries. The backlight is far from useless, it is absolutely perfect for night reading! Content was an issue as well. Not for me personally, though, as I found tons of stuff to read between Project Gutenberg free etexts and little science fiction publishers. Now with the latest version of MobiPocket Reader you can buy and download secure MobiPocket eBooks. This should result in a lot more "mainstream" national best seller books being released under the Secure MobiPocket format. Don't forget I get daily news from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the Onion and zdnet courtesy of MobiPocket. There are tons of news magazines/papers/online news that you can get. I also recommend anyone who owns the EBM or is interesting in purchasing check out the eBookMan Yahoo group. You'll find lots of info as far as where to get ebooks and also cool applications that people have developed for it! Don't buy this for a PDA. If you love reading and think you can handle a little futzing with the tech part of it I recommend this product!
Rating:
Summary: crep for [the amount]
Review: I bought this from here in december and got last friday.I spent my whole weekend and monday and tuesday trying to install the operating system without any luck. Tried to call technical dept. and the answer is "you may want to try 5 more times to install it as there are some problems lots of people are noticing,you are doing right steps to install".Battery compartment is worst,springs are at the positive end of battery and it never recovers for 30 min. after you remove the batteries to reboot it. Donot waste your money,buy handspring visor deluxe for ...(a little) more.
Rating:
Summary: Junk at all trades, sufficient at none
Review: I bought this thing for two main purposes - to read e-books and use as an mp3 player. Forget the books - the poor quality screen and essentially non-existent backlight made the eBookman unusable for that purpose. As an mp3 device, it took an extremely long time to download the one song I tried; it played, but the "speaker" was a joke. I also tried unsucessfully to download Audible books to the Franklin; what a waste of time. Franklin should make a gadget to ONE thing well instead of everything poorly. One star is too high a rating.
Rating:
Summary: not too bad...
Review: I got the eBookman to read books in txt format.
For this purpose the device works very well.
The problems others have described with loosing content when changing batteries, etc... all seem to have been fixed at this date. The present version of the OS allows any number of audible books, txt and html files to be stored in the MMC.
Sadly, purchased books can't be stored on the MMC, and the Microsoft reader is still not available. The Mobipocket reader promises to synchronize the latest news from the Internet to the eBookman. However, I can't check this now as the mobipocket.com website has an internal server error.
Rating:
Summary: from bad to worse, Bad Product and Bad support...
Review: I have had some problems when I use the audio book and music player. When it's on, every 20 seconds there are an interruption
and have a bad sound. This is the inferior product you can find in the line of e-books. The batteries are completely drained to fast, and when you replaced the batteries you will lose all the information
Rating:
Summary: This is a great deal on the ebookman!
Review: I just got started with the ebookman today but I can see already that it is an excellent value at this price. It comes with all the accessories, which surprised me. I had no trouble setting it up. You can read other format books besides the .fub. I still have a lot to learn on it, but I think with a little playing around I will have it figured out before long. I was a little worried about getting one after reading some of the reviews, but it works great for me. The only reason I gave it only 4 stars instead of five is because I still need to explore the other features. Here is my new 5 star update after using the ebookman. It works great! I can enter any saved text into it as well as study guides. If you can copy it onto notepad, you can enter and read it in ebookman. Who ever said it was limited in formats is technology challenged!
| 
