Many many thanks!! I knew i can always count on you. I’ll go and shop around to get the best price for a new tablet.

Regards,
Dani

I added a new section at the bottom of this article that describes my experiences with PDF and ePUB (native format used by the Kindle) formatted electonic books on the Xoom and Playbook.

I have a WIFI-only Xoom with the Honeycomb 3.1 update. I am fairly certain that my Xoom shows movie rentals in the Market (maybe I am thinking of the Amazon Appstore, I will have to double-check). My Internet connection, however, is not fast enough to support streaming video, so I have not tried to rent a movie for the Xoom.

Dani,
I purchased the eBook version of the book “Troubleshooting Oracle Performance”, and tested the PDF version on a laptop, the Xoom, and the PlayBook – comparing the output with the printed book. I will post a more detailed review of that eBook viewing experience, as well as the experience with a couple of others, in a later comment in this article. The ezPDF Reader and Quickoffice Pro HD applications on the Xoom produced the best looking embedded pictures when viewing PDFs of the book, while the Adobe Acrobat Reader on the Xoom and PlayBook had a tendency to drop lines of resolution in embedded pictures rather than using antialiasing techniques – the same is true on the laptop when shrinking the Acrobat window to roughly the same screen size as is found on the Xoom or PlayBook.

Nice review. You should do reviews on cnet or techcrunch. Just a thought

Yes I agree that honeycomb 3.1 update fixes many behind the scenes. Too bad the movie rental update is left out for wifi-only version. I hope it will be available soon.

I have typically purchased printed books rather than PDF versions of the books, so it is difficult for me to compare the two side by side. As far as I am able to tell, the PDF versions of books on tablets are very close in appearance to the printed books. On the Xoom tablet, it does not appear that the PDF viewers (I have tried the ezPDF Reader, the PDF reader that is bundled with Quickoffice Pro HD, and Acrobat’s recently released PDF viewer) will “re-flow” the text around other objects, so that seems to mean that the page should be rendered correctly.

I have a printed and PDF copy of “Expert Oracle Practices” (PDF purchased from Apress), a printed and PDF copy of “Expert Oracle One-on-One” (printed copy is from the original publisher, PDF copy was included with “Expert Oracle Database Architecture 9i and 10g” book), and a PDF copy of “Oracle Performance Firefighting”. I will try to find some time to put together a comparison of laptop vs. tablet, and printed book vs. tablet. The electronic version of “Beginning Oracle SQL” that I purchased from the Andoid market is not a PDF, but it renders very well in the Xoom’s Books application.

On the Xoom tablet, the text in the Apress book “Beginning Oracle SQL” was a little too small to read comfortably with the tablet showing two pages, but is very easy to read with the tablet in portrait orientation. I will have to check PDF files to see if the same is true.

I would very much appreciate if you have some time to check over few oracle pdf books which you reviewed and see if are formatted ok as i’m planning to buy a 10 inch tablet so i can read all the books. Unfortunately i couldn’t find a clear/ honest point of view to decide if it’s worth buying a tablet for reading (e-reader is not good as you can’t read on a 6 inch display – i’ve checked on a Amazon Kindle and the images are not formatted well on a pure pdf).

Thank you,
Dani

I am still in the experimentation stage with electronic books. I only have one book in the native Xoom books application and one book (Expert Oracle Practices) in PDF format. There is a Kindle application for the Xoom, but I heard that there are occasional formatting issues with the Kindle book format, so I have not tried any books in that format.