Sony PRS ereader review. Is the Sony Prs the best erader on the market?
The Sony PRS-900, Sony’s first wireless eBook reader is finally in house. I didn’t expect it to dethrone my Sony Reader Touch Edition PRS-600, which also sports an e-ink display with touch screen technology, but I must admit the Reader Daily Edition is tempting. That 1.1 inches of extra screen isn’t just great for fast readers but it allows Sony to further expand the home screen and have plenty of room for the store screen.
As with the PRS-600, the 900 has an excellent user interface that’s very intuitive and on the 900, highly graphical. No staring at text-based lists of titles with little if any visual separation between content types (Kindle, I’m looking at you). Instead you’ve got a section for latest deliveries (generally speaking periodicals) with a cover shot, another section with a shortcut to continue reading your last book or periodical, a section listing books by cover and icons for all periodicals on the reader, collections (you create collections as way to organize content) and notes.
The store works in conjunction with the built-in AT&T 3G wireless radio (there are no monthly charges). There is no web browser, just access to the bookstore. The store is attractive and intuitive and you can turn on or off one-click buying. We like being able to turn off one-click buying and go with the shopping cart instead because it’s too easy for a novice, friend or child to accidentally buy, buy, buy. You’ll also need to enter your Sony online bookstore password when you enter the bookstore (again, prevents thieves, children and curious cats from buying content). The bookstore could load a bit more quickly and we suspect infrastructure improvements could make this happen because AT&T 3G runs strong here and the Sony Reader Daily Edition gets a stronger signal than the LG xpo and HP Glisten. Books and periodicals download very quickly, attesting to good 3G service here in the Dallas area. As with the Kindle, you can subscribe to periodicals or just buy the current issue. Subscriptions automatically download when a new issue is available.
The display is a 600 x 1024 Vizplex e-ink screen that measures 7.1″ and has 16 levels of gray. Gray levels help with images such as book covers and photos that you load on the device, but makes less of a difference for text. Since the PRS-900 does pubs, and pubs use images, it makes sense to go with the 16 shades of gray. Does it look better than my PRS-600 Touch Edition display when reading text? I’d say they’re quite similar, and that means slightly lower clarity due to the touch screen layer’s reduction of contrast. I find it very readable even if it’s not as high contrast.
If you wish to side-load content using the Sony Reader desktop application on Windows and Mac, you can do that no problem. Or you can download everything via wireless and avoid the desktop software. That is, if you only read content gotten from Sony’s online bookstore. If you want to load your own texts, music, PDFs files and the like you can use a card reader since the Daily Edition has a memory stick duo slot and an SD card slot. But if you want to load eBooks from the library, you’ll need to use the desktop software.
for more information on best way to download ebooks, or here for more information on Sony ebooks.
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