gdgt

The recently launched Opus is a light-weight, beautiful and ergonomic e-book reader from French company Bookeen .

It has a 5-inch high resolution e-ink screen, minimalist design and operations, and offers 1Gb of internal memory. You can expand its memory through Mini SD cards but, unless you want to use it for very large PDF files, you'll probably never need it, since 1 gig is more than enough for more than 1 year worth of book readings.

Compared to the Kindle, it doesn't have a keyboard, 3G connectivity, annotations and the Kindle store. But do you really need all that? I live in Brazil and none of it works here. On the flip side, the Opus is much smaller, lighter, and you can load it with any text format you want (DRM or not). Another differential the Opus has is its built-in accelerometer, which allows you to rotate the screen orientation just by moving the device. Although I don't use this often, it is certainly a geeky touch.

The only problem I experienced so far is the fact that it freezes somewhat frequently. You need to do a reset to have it working again, which is annoying. From what I read in different forums, Bookeen engineers are working to have this problem fixed through a firmware update.

Two pieces of advice if you are considering buying the Opus:

- Buy it from BooksonBoard.com instead of directly from Bookeen. They sell it for USD $249,00, 30 bucks less compared to Bookeen's price. Unfortunately I found out about it after my purchase, and Bookeen refused to give me the same discount.

- Download library management software Calibre at calibre.kovidgoyal.net. It helps you manage your books, convert files to any format (my preferred is ePub) and sync with the Opus. Also, it offers a list of blogs and sites to fetch news periodically, which will provide you the ability to subscribe to you favorite news sources as the Kindle does. Although you can simply drag-and-drop files to the device, Calibre will enhance your experience.

I hope you enjoy your Opus as much as I do!