Sony Reader PRS-500 hands-on + Connect Reader screenshots
By Peter Rojas 
posted September 26th 2006 1:02AM
posted September 26th 2006 1:02AM
Last night we nabbed an exclusive sneak peek at the oft-delayed Sony Reader, which we're happy to report is finally getting close to coming out.
What we can't report, at least not yet, is a confirmed MSRP or when it is actually going to go on sale. Sony wouldn't tell us. But we did manage to get a first-hand look at the final production version of the device, as well as snap a whole slew of pics (and score some screenshots of the Connect Reader software client and Sony's eBook Store). Tech specs are more or less the same as when they announced the Reader at CES this past January -- a 6-inch E Ink display, enough battery life for 7,500 page turns, support for DRM'd BBeB and unprotected PDF, TXT, RTF, and Word files -- but the big news is that this thing will in fact support RSS feeds. Sort of. You can pick from a very limited list of feeds that have been specially formatted for viewing on the Reader (Engadget among them!), you just sync them to the device just like you do with an eBook.
Click on for a bunch of pics!
As you'd expect, the display is incredibly easy to read. It's not quite paper, but text looks way better than it does on an LCD. There's no flicker, but if you look closely you can sometimes see the faint outlines of the last page you looked at.
Comics on the Reader.
And of course, a pic side-by-side with my trusty Treo.
Sony Connect Reader app. This shot shows your library of content which can synched onto the Reader.
You can access the eBook Store directly from the Connect Reader app. Prices vary, but are generally about 20-25% cheaper than what you'd pay for a paper copy of a book.
They're really big on these bundles.
Any odds on them managing to keep the price under $200.00???? Actually, I would prefer to buy it through one of my regular book sellers like Barnes and Noble or Borders rather than have to rely on Sony. I never did like their music download software. Why should this be any different?
Do you think we will ever reach a point where these executives and investors understand that technology people should do technology and media people should do media and that the two don't mix in the same company very well? Sony should make the reader and then get out of the way. Not to d*** likely but I can wish.
BT
It would be nice if they could release a model that shows two pages side-by-side, like in a real book.
The reason being that sometimes illustrations are applied across both pages.
THEN we could get comics on it. It would save a whole buncha space.
(It would be even better if it folded like a book, and had a minimal bevel between pages.)
I lug around many many books and it is just to bulky to deal with, this may not be perfect, but seems to fit the bill for me. In any case, I just pre-ordered one, and the estimated ship date is 09/28/06. Let's hope this is true. BTW, ground shipping is free, and expedited shipping came up as $271!!! And ultrafast shipping was over $350! I wonder if this was some sort of system glitch, hope so.
how fast does it render PDFs? I have the nokia770 and it is dog slow in rendering pdfs with images on it.
This looks like a great product - it's too bad it's about $100 too expensive. However, I predict success if they can get college textbooks on their book store. I large percentage of students would love something like this if it meant not having to lug around 40 pounds of textbooks.
Dear Sony,
I beg you... loose the software!
Why?
I wish to USE your new device, not ending up with all kinds of compatibility problems... (which is to be expected given the wide variety of PDFs available)
Yours,
Dutch Scientist
(having to read through dozens of scientific PDF articles every week)
If the BBeB format is opened up so that people can make convertors from all the various formats ebooks are sold in, then I might be interested in this.
The few ebooks I have, I keep in OEB format and I won't purchase any that come in a proprietory format unless a convertor exists to changed them to OEB.
I do this to ensure I don't lose access to anything I've purchased when the company that makes the proprietory reader goes bust or doesn't update it to work with the latest hardware or OS we may have in the future.
If sony make the format open enough for people to build convertors from OEB (or other formats) to BBeB, then I'd be happy with that.
I still wouldn't ever buy a book in direct in BBeB format unless I could back covert it to OEB, but I'd be happy to continue to purchase books in other formats that can be converted to OEB for storage and then to BBeB just for reading on this device.
The estimated retail prices is a bit off putting at the moment though. I use a Palm C currently and it would need to be cheaper before I purchased a single use device rather than the multipurpose palm.
Man I'd love to have one of these but knowing Sony, it will be too expensive. I hate reading PDF books on my computer but this device is perfect for in the bed reading. If it sells for $150 they'll have a winner but I doubt it.
As someone who has owned (and sold) the Japanese version of this device I can tell you the screen is e huge improvement over reading text on a pda or a Treo. While color is noce, most books I read have text not a lot of pictures so grey scale is fine. Things I would want: 1. Ereader support, 2. A quikpedia front end so I can carry around the wikipedia encyclopaedia (have it in my treo now), a word doc reader and a price point of $199 or even $99 plus you have to buy 12 books at $20 each
I looked that Sony E-book look nice...I was wonder if there will be next E-book...color, newspaper,manga, movie and etc...that's possble future? Who knows? I will wait for new E-book soon.
this looks so old school. I had an ereader from rocket book, or something like that...I bought it from Barnes and noble in 2000 and it looks similar to this device.
Would be nice to see it with color, and a good backlight(not sure if it has one).
I guess this is addressed to anyone who has a demo of the Reader...
Are we able to do any highlighting or underlining of text on the Reader?
The interface certainly strikes me as a step backwards for Sony. Two Sony devices that I use on a daily basis--my PSP and my Clie TJ37--have what are in my opinion excellent UIs.
I realize that this unit represents something of a fledgling technology, so I'm not terribly surprised at the price point. Hopefully, once production and adoption rates increase, the price will drop to the $150 range, at which point I will happily snap one up. In order to garner anything aside from niche adoption, though, the ebook situation will have to change drastically.
I mean, come on. Publishers already have the books in a digital format--that's how they get sent to press--there is therefore no reason for the current dearth of legitimately purchasable ebook titles. How much capital investment would be required to convert them to a consumer format for use on devices like this? Little enough. I also understand that publishers are worried about cannibalizing their paper book sales. However, once the book is formatted for electronic distribution, any income over and above bandwidth costs becomes "free money." Or, piggybacking on the paperbook model, each copy sold could have a download code for a free copy in electronic format.
None of these are perfect solutions, of course, but if Sony et al. want to get ebooks out of the shadows and into the mainstream, they need to do something. And I'd rather it were sooner than later.
That's really cool gadget and I like the idea of E book very much. As a student I spent half of my day time reading electronic papers and documents. Stick my eyes at the LCD screen is frustrating and the laptop is cumbersome to me. How soon will this appear in market?
I think I'll wait for the 3rd generation when there's no ghosting. Love the idea and can't wait to get one!
check this ereader out...hrmmm cool that it has a keyboard
http://www.jinke.com.cn/compagesql/English/service/index.asp
Some things I'm not seeing people talking about are:1) The 6-inch
display (can any PDA come close to that?)2) The fact that the
screen does not eat up battery power when a pageis displayed.
(Try reading The Silmarillon on a Lithium Ion battery without
recharging it, say, 20 times).3) The e-ink technology makes
reading easier on the eyes... especiallyif you are going to be
reading for an hour or more.4) Some of us don't think $350 is a
lot of money and are more interested in saving trees and bookshelf
space.5) Sony's Reader is perfect for those of us who thought
"Zork" and others like it were the coolest interactive adventure
games ever.
Very cool and all, but the sad thing is, if I really wanted to read a book, I could just hit the library, and get a much larger selection for *free*.
I have one; it came yesterday. My husband bought it for me after listening to me whine for years about dragging home giant manuals to read on the couch. And I have to tell you, I love it. The display is amazing, even if that refresh thing is a little weird. Reading on this device is very very much like reading a book and not at all like reading on a palm pilot (ow) or a laptop (double ow). The software is OK, not as ITunesish as it looked in their demo screens. The offerings of the Connect store don't really inspire the same need to buy that Apple did with iTunes. I mean, 99 cents is an impulse buy; 15.49 is not.
No, it does not highlight in yellow, and there is no Wifi and there are other things it doesn't do either. And it does not smell like books, and there are no rustling pages. But what it does do is represent the printed page very very well in an exceedingly small form factor. For text files, it is great, so all that stuff on Gutenberg is good to go. PDFs display on it very clearly but due to the fact that the screen is about 1/4 the size of a sheet of paper, the PDFs tend to be darn difficult to read. You can flip the text into a landscape mode that makes things somewhat better, good enough for me but not necessarily for those with aging eyes.
So, in summary, great device, funky software that could use a little work, perfect readability, txt files rock, photos look great in greyscale, PDFs not so great, canned offerings need work, more free books would be nice, kind of expensive but then again, so are a lot of things.
I travel a lot and carting books around is a pain - I just bought one and love it. My only small compalint is that certain books are not avaialble in e-format.
Sandra
Hello, what about searching pages? if I want to go directly to page 300...?