Were picky when it comes to these plate readers. They have to hit the Goldilocks zone of comfortable enough to hold in your hand as you could a piece of paper but big enough to view everything you might need to see between the final approach fix and the missed approach without panning or zooming.

The FX8 is all that. Its running on the iRex 800, which measures 7.6 by 5.9 inches and, perhaps more importantly, its almost all screen (8.1 inches diagonal). Its also only 0.4 inches thick and weighs 12.6 ounces. The battery charges off a USB connection, which is also how you update the charts and load any other documents you might want. We left the device running for 12 hours and drew the battery down about 60 percent from a full charge, so SOLIDFXs claims of 24-hour battery life are reasonable.

The screen is not touch sensitive. To tap on-screen buttons you must use a special stylus. This is an overall downside, in our opinion, as you have to keep the stylus on a lanyard around your neck or hanging from the panel to prevent dropping it somewhere out of reach in the cockpit. You can control the FX8 via the button and switch on the left side of the unit, but its cumbersome for anything other than paging through a list of preselected charts.

One plus of the pen, however, is a built-in writing pad. You can call up blank pages to copy clearances or even mark up approach plates. SOLIDFX plans to have an option to import custom documents to mark up with the pen, such as loading manifests. The iRex reader is designed for eBooks and can read PDF documents. This is handy as you can toss your maintenance manual on the device when you travel, as we’ll as those romance novels you secretly read on long, en route stretches.

The real innovation of this reader is how it organizes charts. There are four blank tabs across the top (there are six on the