Review – Sony Reader Digital Book PRS-700
by Kris Abel on Tue 11 Nov 2008 08:00 AM EST
Sony’s latest Reader Digital Book allows you to turn a page by merely
swiping your finger across the screen. When that page is the contents index,
you merely have to touch the title of a chapter to have the book
automatically flip to it. It’s a delight to read with your fingers again. As
with Sony’s previous eBook devices, the new Reader uses a special E-ink
display that is designed to duplicate the look and presence of paper. The
technology is still relatively young and the addition of touchscreen
controls comes as a bit of a surprise, but Sony has achieved their task
well. The touch interface is responsive, simple, and delivers a natural feel
and flow to reading. A main menu, offering big friendly icons to touch, make
it easy to access your books, the title you are currently reading, your
notes, photos, and music. Everything is right there as soon as you open the
cover, as it should be.
With Sony’s previous model, the PRS-505, they managed to get many elements
right and its pleasant to see them carry those forward instead of making any
drastic changes. The Reader is still about the size and shape of a notebook,
offers a large 6” monochrome screen that can display text, illustration, and
digital pictures with the quality of print, hold approximately 350 eBooks,
maintain a long battery life (7,500 page turns), and support a wide range of
file formats including BBeb, PDF, EPUB, RTF, TXT, JPEG, PNG, GIF, BMP, MP3,
and AAC. You can use it with eBooks from a number of online stores including
Sony’s own eBook store, your own home-made documents by converting them with
included software, and with a set of connected headphones even use the
device to listen to music, audiobooks, and podcasts.
With the new touchscreen controls come a number of valuable enhancements,
chief of which is the extended options for text size. There are now five
levels of text size to choose from, plus an on-screen scroll bar that you
can drag with your finger to zoom into the page, helping you customize the
size of the text as you need. The scroll bar takes a few tries to get used
to, but the results are better than you’d get with physical buttons and
reformatting of the text, a process that has to change the entire book you
are reading, is near-instantaneous.
The onscreen controls have made it easy for Sony to add a more convenient
options menu, it merely hovers off-screen and when you call it up by
pressing the physical “options” button at the bottom of the device, it pulls
up a quick screen giving you access to features based on the page you are
reading. This makes it easier to change the orientation of the page, from
portrait to landscape for example. It also gives you access to two new
features, the ability to highlight a body of text and the ability to add a
virtual notation to the page using a virtual keyboard.
Highlighting is fairly easy, there are two icons. Tap one to add
highlighting, any text you run across with your finger will be captured in a
grey field, and tap the other icon to then turn your finger into an eraser
so you can run your finger over the same body of text and return it to
normal. The results don’t quite stand out or are as readable as a real
highlighter, but it serves the purpose.
The trickier feature is the notation as you have to first highlight a line
of text and then tap on it to bring up the option to add a notation to it.
Not the most intuitive system. This brings up a virtual keyboard and it’s
here that the touch controls falter under your fingertips. I found that as a
typed, the screen only captured every third or fourth letter and that the
better option is to use the included stainless steel stylus included.
Secured in a little hiding slot at the top of the Reader, packing at the
onscreen keyboard with the stylus works very well, allowing you to quickly
and accurately peck out letters with light taps. Once you have a few notes
written, you can quickly access them through a dedicated index. There’s one
for each book and one at the main menu that lists all the notes on your
entire Reader device.
The final improvement is the built-in reading light system. A series of
miniature LED lights placed along the side of the screen, the light is not
the ideal solution, you can see the naked bulbs peeking out from within
their side housing which is a distraction and the light they cast onto the
screen isn’t very uniform, the edges are better lit than the centre of the
page, but it is better than no light at all and until there’s a breakthrough
in E-ink screens that allow them to be back-lit the same as LCD and TFT
screens on mobile devices (and somehow still retain their paper-like
nature), then admittedly Sony’s light is the best solution available. There
are two levels of brightness and thanks to the use of LED lights, the power
drain is minimal allowing the Reader to maintain its extraordinary battery
lifespan.
The enhancements arrive on top of basic technical upgrades, the new Reader
has 450 MB of system memory, twice that of the previous model, plus card
slots for both Memory Stick Duo and SD cards, but also comes packaged with a
new version of Sony eBook Library Software. Version 2.5 includes a wider
range of file formats that it can support for conversion over to the device,
including Microsoft Word Documents, EPUB files, and with added free software
from Adobe, protected PDF files. The only upgrade Sony has yet to achieve is
to make their software available to Mac users, even at Version 2.5, it is
still limited to Windows Vista and XP users.
One final smart choice on Sony’s part worth mentioning is their decision to
offer the new $400 touchscreen Reader as an optional model, not a
replacement for the less expensive, but non-touch Reader which is still
available at $300. While both represent more money than you might normally
invest in reading material, both devices offer a remarkable way to enjoy
eBooks, a new reading trend that is quickly finding its way into the hearts
of many, including my own.
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