The main scenario I had in mind for the XO-1 was as a portable reader, both online and offline, on the road and also in bed (it is so inconvenient to have to get up and walk over to the living room for my daily fill of news websites). Technology issues aside, a laptop in bed is not going to happen, because Cissy does not tolerate that level of laziness and won't hear any of it (even an iPod is pushing it).

Online reading via the built-in browser works famously. Thanks to its Mozilla code base, web sites render as they should, images, JavaScript and even Flash (except for video clips) works, fonts look great (free Japanese fonts, by the way, are available on the Japanese government web-site). There is no email client, but web-mail should work (no problem with GMail). One downside is the inability to open links in a new tab or window, so that you are limited to linear browsing and cannot queue up pages for later access. You can bookmark pages, but not before actually opening them.

Offline reading with the currently available software is tricky. At first I thought I could use the PDF reader and downloaded me a couple of Cory Doctorow novels. As it turns out, PDF is not really a good format for screen readers, because the layout is fixed and cannot be adjusted to display size or orientation. Zooming in to make the characters legible leaves to few of the visible at the same time to read without scrolling around like crazy. The next choice was HTML, which the reader can re-flow and re-page to fit the screen, and while that works well online, I could not figure out how to save a file for offline access from the browser. Manually placing the file on the disk using the command line (wget) does not do much good either, because unless the file is managed by the Journal activity, it does not appear in the user interface at all. It seems the easiest (only?) way to do this is to prepare content for the XO-1 on a USB memory stick or SD card, similar to how iPods work (an SD card is better, because it disappears inside the laptop, whereas USB devices stick out from the side).

The XO-1 can be put into tablet mode by folding the screen over the keyboard. This has the potential for a nice book reading experience. The only keys you can still use in this case are the power button, a cursor pad, four game-pad buttons, and the display orientation switch. That should be plenty to zoom, scroll and page around a book, and maybe even click links on a web site and move a mouse pointer directly. Unfortunately, and this is a real shame, the software does not make use of the buttons in any useful way, so that you need to go back to the inaccessible keyboard for many basic functions. Also, the screen rotation feature is not co-ordinated with the cursor pad, so that pressing Up will sometimes scroll right (or left, or down).

Another problem is the long time it takes for the XO-1 to boot up. It should be possible to put the machine into sleep mode and very quickly resume from there, but apparently this is not implemented, which is surprising considering how much thought went into energy preservation for the hardware. As it is, having to power it down completely makes it inconvenient as a book reader.