Sony Reader Review/Discussion

It's time talk about the lovely Sony Reader PRS-505 (Portable Reading System). Just came in today. Right, so this blogger wakes up in the morning. Walks downstairs and switches on E4 for Veronica Mars. The doorbell rings and who shows up, but the postman with a package. A beautiful package addressed to yours truly. Inside, as described on ebay, resided a sealed box containing a Sony Reader PRS-505. Unfortunately, Veronica Mars had to fade away to the background for this wonderful gadget.

So, enough of background. What does this thing do? In simple terms, the Sony Reader is an electronic book. The user uploads e-books downloaded from the internet, onto the reader, and reads it whenever and wherever they want. The Reader uses an e-Ink which is a sort of electronic paper. It uses very small amounts of energy to keep the screen displaying text so instead of measuring battery life in hours, it measures battery life in page turns. A fully charged reader can have 6000+ page turns, something around 6 books worth.


The Reader is extremely easy to use. The controls are intuitive and the E-Book Library software that comes with it is equally simple. It accepts a number of formats including PDF, RTF and it's own native file LRF. If you have .lit, it is a simple matter of downloading some freeware to convert .lit -> pdf/rtf whatever you want. Although the Reader also accepts pictures and mp3s, the E-Ink technology isn't designed for displaying images and why would you waste precious space and power for mp3s when you have an mp3 player/iPod/phone. The Reader comes with 256mb internal memory but does have slots for SD cards which you can use to supplement the number of books you can read. In all honesty, an e-book is only around 2-3mb max so 256 can already fit 80+ books so unless you're really indecisive all the time or you want every book ever written to be available at your finger tips at all times, a little bit of foreplanning and organisation is enough to keep all the books you want for any trip.

The design is fantastic; it's sleek, it's sexy and above all, it's functional. The £160-190 price tag is a bit hefty but if you're at university, and you don't want to bring all your books with you and you want to snuggle up in bed with your favourite coffee table warmer, the Reader is definitely for you! Or me, should I say. With a bit of lateral thinking, the Reader can also come in use if you want to do presentations without cue cards ^_-

Here's another picture =D