Information Engineer

The new Reader (model PRS-505) features a svelte body design. Re-styled controls more closely mimic paper page turns and allow for quick, intuitive navigation. A next-generation electronic paper display delivers faster response and a higher contrast ratio for easy reading even in bright sunshine. Eight levels of gray scale provide for crisp and clear text, images, and graphics. This device is designed for people on the go, this device is compelling because it allows them to carry a wide variety of reading materials whether they are on a cross-country flight, in a doctor’s office waiting room, or at a beach resort. The Reader can handle a stack of books and other documents that people would rather not carry, yet offers a ‘book-like’ reading experience unavailable with other electronic devices. With the capacity to store up to 160 typical eBooks, the Reader can act as a mobile library. Expansion slots for Memory Stick Duo media or SD memory cards make the device’s library potential practically limitless.More advanced users will appreciate the USB-based mass storage capability that allows them to use the device as a portable drive for the direct transfer of documents, images and other files to the Reader. A new auto sync feature also lets users set up folders with books and documents that can be automatically synchronized when the device is connected to a PC.

Technical Details:
displays eBooks purchased from the CONNECT eBook online store
displays Adobe® PDFs, plus TXT, RTF, BMP, JPEG, GIF, PNG and Microsoft® Word files
plays MP3 and AAC files (protected files not supported)
internal 192MB memory
memory slot holds an SD Memory Card (up to 2GB capacity) and Memory Stick® Duo media (up to 8GB capacity)

Customer feedback:

1. The PRS-505 is Sony’s second version of its portable book reader. This unit supports written documents in Sony’s proprietary eBook format as well as PDF, RTF and text formats. The display on this unit is improved from the 1st generation, and the text is highly readable. The display could appear a bit brighter, but does not strain the eyes as the first generation did. Because of the display technology, the brighter the light in which the page is viewed, the more readable it is.
There are a great many public domain titles available around the Internet for free. And Sony’s CONNECT software enables users to brows the Sony bookstore and purchase titles.

2. I’ve read e-books for years on my PDA’s from Palm to Pocket PC. I recently bought this reader from Sony, and I really like it. It has a much bigger screen than the Pocket PC phone I’ve been using most recently (XV6700), or any PDA I’ve used for that matter.
Pros:
-Supports RTF, TXT and PDF formats without any conversion. The included software makes it easy to add books to either the main memory or one of the memory cards-simply drag and drop.
-Nice, clear text, readable under the brightest of lights. It’s easy on the eyes, and after reading for hours on it, my eyes are not strained.
-Supports mp3 playback while you’re reading. Not a feature I use, but it may be nice for some.
-It’s light enough that my hands don’t get tired holding it for extended periods.
-Supports additional books on Memory Stick Pro Duo and Secure Digital. It’s the first Sony product I’ve ever had that supported anything other than Memory Stick.
-Ability to store multiple bookmarks to keep your place if you’re like me and read many books at the same time.
-Reads PDF files. None of my PDA readers could do that, I had to use Acrobat on the reader, which I didn’t like.
-Good battery life. My PDA’s got 3 hours or so if I was lucky. Not sure how many hours I’ll get off of a charge, but it seems like it’ll be a lot.

Cons:
-No HTML support. Seems like it would’ve been easy to add this. There are free converters to convert HTML to RTF/TXT format.
-Refresh rate is a bit sluggish. On my PDA’s it would turn the page instantly, this one has a small delay to draw the page, but it doesn’t bother me. If you think it might, you might want to try a demo unit at a retail store first. Still, it draws the page in a second or less.
-No backlight. Probably not included due to battery life, but you can’t read it in bed at night with the lights off. I bought a 15 dollar LED clip on light and use that, and it works great with it. This way I can read at night w/o bothering my spouse.
-Price. This isn’t cheap. It was worth it to me since I read virtually all my books as e-books, and I was sick of the small screens on my PDA. So I guess the value depends on how much you’ll use it.