As it turns out, those Sony Reader
leaks from earlier this week were spot on. The company just went official with the PRS-300 and 600, which will more affectionately be known as the Pocket and Touch editions, respectively. The latter (pictured left, not to scale) is the 6-inch resistive touchscreen model replacing the PRS-700, with Memory Stick / Duo and SD card slots. The backlighting layer from its predecessor has been dropped to improve touch responsiveness and to alleviate concerns of glare. It also comes packing a stylus and a digitized copy of the Oxford American English Dictionary and will be available in red, black, and silver. The Pocket Edition, on the other hand, is your standard fare with no touchscreen or expandable disk port, and palettes including blue, silver, and rose. Both models have USB 2.0, 512MB internal memory, and no WiFi whatsoever -- Sony assures us a WiFi version is coming and there'll be news on those coming soon, but this isn't it. There's also Mac compatibility, a first for the series, that's trickling down to older models via a firmware update. Touch and Pocket will be available by the end of August and will retail for $299 and $199, a substantially more competitive price point than its previous generation. Speaking of which, as of tomorrow, the Sony's e-book store is dropping the prices of its bestsellers from $11.99 to $9.99. A win all around, but will it be enough to make a dent in
Kindle's stronghold? Things are certainly getting more interesting.
posted August 4th 2009 6:11PM
Cool
Seems like people don't want to pay $600+ for a book reader.
$200 sounds much more reasonable but I still wait for $50 per piece.
Actually, with the new Mac compatibility, the prs-505 looks more tempting. Are these new ones going to have faster page-turning?
While $199 is €138, Sony will find a way to sell it for at least €199, probably €219
Colour me interested in the $199 model but won't embark on a financial journey of robbery until the prices of eBooks have been reduced to reasonable levels. Having spent 2 Benjamins on a device, I would want to buy books at a reduced cost of at the maximum 60% of the price for a physical copy of a book. Thrown in PDF support into the mix and I might be buying my first eBook at the end of the year, but not until pricing has been sorted out.
The PRS devices have supported PDF for some time now...
Also, there are plenty of great public domain books available. Surely you can find some you like out of the 1,000,000 public domain works? As for the purchase price of e-books, they will never be 60% of their paper counterparts. There is just not that much of a margin on books. They are already typically 20% cheaper, which with my reading habits paid off my PRS-505 in little over a year.
This is where the whole thing falls down for me. eBooks. are £6, say, on waterstones or £2 paperback on amazon. If this is to be a success then there needs to be more piracy.
Since I've gotten my Sony PRS-505 about 8 months ago, I've gotten 26 free e-books (about half from Sony) that have ranked 4.5- or 5-stars in Amazon customer reviews. And another 16 that ranked 4-stars. These are all novels, mostly current.
With its PDF support (as ben ackerman mentioned), and Calibre for magazines, the value proposition for me has been sorted out long ago.
Exactly what i like to see. More competition and more devices in the e-reader arena. Hopefully in about another year, it will be a golden time to buy.
The pocket version has 5" screen according to zdnet. FYI.
i need a e-book for newspaper
Agreed. Love the price, but Sony needs to add periodicals, journals, magazines and newspapers to their e-store. Then I'm in.
Calibre is what I use with the PRS-505. Works really well for general news.
I need a newspaper for the coupons(the only reason I still get it). Problem is, I don't see stores taking electronic versions of coupons.
I think they're making a mistake sticking to the touchscreen. I have a PRS-505 and am neurotic about avoiding fingerprints and smudges on the screen, and that's just accidental ones. I'd much prefer the 505 with a bigger screen and a backlight.
The matt finish seems to do pretty good at not taking fingerprints. (where my shiny Palm Pre shows every blasted fingerprint. lol)
A) They're not sticking to the touch screen, they're offering versions with and without.
b) You can't backlight e-ink, it's opaque. (I'm so tired of have to respond with this in every damn ebook reader post.)
Ok so not "backlit" but side lit or something. I just want to read in the dark, damn it.
reading in dark is very BAD for your eyes
The added a front/side light in the PRS700 between the touchscreen layer and the E-ink layer. While a neat feature to have built in, a lot of the complaints about viewability of the model (glare, low contrast) were due to the inclusion of the system which is why the 600 model is doing away with it. The touch screen will still reduce the contrast of the 600's E-ink screen, but it should still look better than the 700's.
The 700 didn't have any issues with fingerprints and smudges drastically affecting the readability of the screen (compromised as it is). Check your local Sonystyle or Borders stores to see if they've got a 700 demoed to see for yourself.
@le chen
what are you? His mother? Let him read in the dark if he wants. I would like a lit model to read on the airplane without turning on the overhead light and bothering everyone.
@light freaks: You know, they make little LED lights with bendy thingies so you can position them right, and clip them onto the device or whatever?
Basically whatever you normally do to read in the dark with an actual book, keep doing that with one of these.
@new devices: these look nice (certainly better than Kindle) - still kind of waiting for the book selection to get better, though. I don't want it to be a case of 'lots of books you want to read are available', I want it to be a case of 'every book I want to read that's in print is available here too', with very few exceptions. Also want to be sure I can buy foreign-language books - as I understand it, existing stores have been effectively region-locked, meaning that you can only buy (eg) Japanese books on the Japanese store [which requires a Japanese credit card address].
Yay Mac support. Even so, having an integrated store would still be convenient, so I'll be interested to see what they do with the wi-fi model.
I have a bad feeling this will be €299 around here... want one regardless.
I don't think making a dent in the Kindle stronghold is relative. Let the Kindle have a bigger share..who cares. As long as Sony is making money off their readers thats what its about
Isn't 512mb with no hope of expansion a bit stingy given the price of flash memory these days.
Anyways, £130 ($200?) for a thin but roughly paper back sized ebook reader with not much bezel + an SD/microsd slot + a touch more res than these, and you may have a deal.
Gizmodo says SD cards for both:
"Am I excited? Yes, for a couple of reasons. Not only does the openness, uncharacteristic of Sony in general, show good will, it ensures that the Sony Reader won't just go down in history as one of Sony's great but all-too-proprietary ideas. Forget even the Mac software and the free books—real proof of openness is that in addition to Memory Sticks, these Readers take SD cards!"
http://gizmodo.com/5330083/sonys-pocket-and-touch-ebook-readers-priced-to-move-promises-wireless-next
the bad thing is that this wont be available till the end of august beginning of september :(
I'd be curious to see how these sell compared to the Kindle. Sony, after the PS2, has really been on the outside looking in in terms of hardware experiments in a lot of tech disciplines, but their progress here looks pretty promising and un-Sony-like.
For now these will never sell as well as kindle. Amazon has a much better end-to-end story for the average user than Sony currently does. Most people just want to take their e-Ink device with them on the go, buy books whenever they want and read the books right away. Having to sync your reader to a computer via USB is a deal-breaker for most.
I personally like the Sony reader better because of the many supported formats--BBeB Book (both LRF and LRX), PDF, Secure PDF, TXT, RTF, ePub, Secure ePub--and the several open source book managers such as Calibre that supports it. But then again, I'm at my computer a lot and don't mind the syncing.
@michaelportent
Considering that Sony was the first company to release an E-ink based electronic book reader (way back in 2006), I'm not sure what you mean by your comment. The Kindle became a hit because of 2 reasons: 1 - Its wireless capabilities made the unit PC-free and a lot more acceptable to the computer-phobic public. 2 - Oprah's recommendation.
It's a bit surprising since, compared to the Sony Reader 505, the 1st gen Kindle looked horrible (imo), had a few design issues (page turn buttons on both sides were convenient but too easy to accidentally press, bad protective cover/case), was more expensive (which people usually knock Sony products for), and had more limited format support.
The Kindle 2, while much better looking (though a bit too iPod-ish for my liking) and fixing a few design issues, dropped the SD memory card slot and the cover became optional. The format support is still more limited.
And then there's the whole remote book deleting fiasco...
Where's the official info? How about a link?
Unfortunately as of now there is no Sony official link since these was just announced today and the official launch is tomorrow but I spoke to a Sony Style store manager before they closed and he said they wont be available till the end of the month altho they start the training for this ones tomorrow.
"Backlit" means to light from behind. The PRS700 was lit from the sides and the diffuser layer distributed this light. It most certainly wasn't a "backlighting layer" (which doesn't make any sense at all).
Anyways, it bugs me that the touch screen model still only has those tiny page turning buttons on the bottom. Though I guess it's still a thousand times better than having no buttons at all.
I believe if it had no buttons and you were to smash your screen then you would be totally screwed, i have an iPhone and i love that it doesn't have much buttons at all, but yet again if you need to do something manually i rather scroll down with a button that with my finger when reading.
would you mind me asking why did you mentioned the backlight, and the sides lit on the 700 model? so far i havent seen anything stating the 600 would have it, i was told it wont:(...make my day.
@JMONA
If you read the entry, you'll see that they stated that Sony removed the "backlighting layer" in the new model. The PRS-700 never had a "backlight" to begin with.
Honestly it didn't really need mention. I just get annoyed when people abuse terms like "backlight".
Why can't Sony just pay Timex some royalties and give these readers indiglo?
just kidding btw.
Sony hasn't yet gone off the deep end like Apple did with the newest iPod Shuffle. Hell, Apple's 2nd gen iPod Touch and iPhone 3G ADDED buttons.
I'm usually not crazy about Sony's UI (the Xross media bar is a pile of garbage). Those icons are incredibly hot, though.
XMB is the shit
I can't believe noone's pointed out the Magna-Doodle-iness of the red one :)
So, with these new devices set to come out in less than a month, when will the PRS-505 have its price reduced even more, to $250 or less?
They have regularly had sales with the PRS-505 at $250 after a $100 rebate. That's what I paid for mine a year and 1/2 ago.
simply i want it...the red one
But will I be able to read my free domain ebooks on it?
Of course. Sony Reader's have always supported PDF, RTF, and plain text.
For that matter I don't know of any ebook reader that cannot also support your own content in some format. Even the Kindle reads non-DRM mobi.
Providing they are ePub, yes.
GREAT... now about that WiFi...
I really want a ebook reader and I like these new Sony's but I wouldn't mind WiFi with it. Love the new Mac support. It was a deal breaker for me that prevented me to purchase their older models.
As much as I would like wifi, I would prefer it to be cheaper since I don't expect my folks to be using this beyond its function as an ebook reader.
This readers would probably be on my "buy" list soon. Kindle isn't that good for me because of the price, the lack of rtf/doc/txt/pdf capabilities and it doesn't have much support outside of the US territories.