Drop, charge, and lose the cords
- Average user rating:
- My rating: 0 stars
Full user review
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7 out of 7 people found this review helpful
4.0 stars
"Recommended for an avid book reader or wanting to avoid eye strain from reading on laptop/PC"
Pros: easy on eyes, less fatigue with reading, enough memory to hold plenty of books, portable, choice of small, medium and large fonts, portait or landscape reading, book marks, remembers where you left
Cons: slow in reading other formats such as pdf, rtf (good with .lrf), black and white, the software needs improvement
Summary: Since i have to read a lot of documents on laptop, PC that was causing eye strain, i wanted an e-reader that is easy on eyes and had read about e-ink technology. And I must say that the Sony PRS 505 reader is a good product in this regard. its as nice to eye as a printed book, but that also means you cant read it in the dark. the inbuilt memory of 190 MB + 2GB SD card + 8GB Sony memory stick assure enough books can be accomodated. user friendly as it remembers what page you were at when you stopped reading last time. other user friendly features i liked are facility of collections (where you can classify your content), landscape/portait reading, menu screen and navigation. Easy to carry, and battery lasts real long inspite of heavy reading. The screen is soothing white in color and size is good trade off between amount of information and portability / mobility. Images look a bit ok. I have been using it for two weeks now, and this thing is selling like hot cakes; i am surprised how come it does not have user reviews on cnet so far.
On the other hand, its very slow in performance when opening certain rtf, pdf. the software is bad at importing other formats such as pdf (especially A4 size) or rtf. if support for these formats is improved, the sales would boom. currently, managing with http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/E-book_conversion . Cmon Sony, take a cue from this site above, you can do better than just publishing a 3-4 pager "how to guide", that relies on people using Acrobat software (not reader) to resize and reformat docs to fit reader. Please read the website mobileread.com; its a good companion. Expect a slightly longish learning curve in getting your PC docs (pdf, chm, doc, html) on to the reader. Also dont expect it to replace your laptop or pc. Also remember, its just black and white.
As compared to competition such as kindle or iliad, i would prefer sony. the kindle might be tied to Amazon only stuff and seems a 100$ more expensive, and iliad is way to expensive at 700$, however you can make your notes.
Wishlist - faster firmware, better support for opening pdf, more investment in e-book library to make it a bit more professional, user friendly and attractive.
e-ink technology has a good future, please add color to our lives, its like going back to 1700s.
Between blue and silver, i found blue better due to its good contrast with the white screen, may be its just me. The metallic finish and the magnetic black cover that snaps to close on reader, are coool.
overall - excellent for taking and reading in garden, train, or in your bed in daytime, and by a night lamp at night. the Sony reader is like a fiction book, just much thinner and lighter and can hold 100s of them. Go, do your eyes a favor by trying it out at a store.
