Life as a beta geek

While I was in New York for the Tools of Change conference, I picked up a Sony PRS-505 e-book reader, which I’ve been using for a week now. Thus far, it’s been an almost entirely pleasurable experience.

Unboxing it, one finds the reader in a smart leather holder, documentation, a software CD and a USB cable which takes care of both charging and transferring content. The use of a single cable is a real plus point for me: my working week includes a lot of travel, and the last thing I want to have to carry is another cable, much less a charger. (The fact that it’ll also charge my BlackBerry via USB is even better). Sony reckon that the reader’s battery is good for 7,500 page turns, and though I can’t corroborate this as I have yet to recharge it, this tallies with my usage so far.

The PRS-505 follows the earlier PRS-500, and is smaller in every dimension: a relatively modest .6mm less in height and 1.6mm less in width, but 5.8mm thinner — a little smaller than a large Moleskine notebook. Although the brushed metal construction makes it heavier than a paperback, it’s also sturdy and looks terrific. The leather case is high quality and protects the reader from knocks and scratches. There’s a very definite wow factor with the reader, which didn’t obtain with the more functional-looking PRS-500: several of my friends, none of them technophiles, have fallen in love with it.

The included software is Windows-only. However, this doesn’t present too great a problem: when the reader is connected to a non-Windows system, it appears as a USB mass storage device, allowing files to be transferred manually. I’ve tried it with XP Pro, Vista, OS X and, of course, eeeXubuntu. It’s worked perfectly each time. There’s 256mb of internal memory, and slots for Memory Stick Duo and SD cards.

It copes with a variety of file formats, including Sony’s proprietary BBeB (LRF), PDF, text files and RTF. It will also display images and play some audio files, though I haven’t explored these areas as yet. Viewing PDFs can be awkward as the text doesn’t resize and reflow as other documents do, and the ability to edit and annotate documents would also be desirable. However, these are relatively minor quibbles given that the overall experience is so positive: compared with a laptop screen, reading longer documents on the Sony is sufficiently pleasant to outweigh any inconvenience suffered in converting and transferring files.

The speed of the page turn seems to be a very definite improvement on the PRS-500, though there is still a very perceptible flash of the screen each time the page turns. At first this can seem a slightly jarring experience, but the remarkable thing is how little time it takes one to learn to ignore it.

There’s been a slight change of control layout from the PRS-500. The earlier model had many of the controls on the left hand side and bottom of the screen. There are now page turn controls at bottom left and on the centre of the right hand side, along with the numbered keys used for menu selection. This layout makes the reader somewhat more comfortable for right-handers to use — though as a left-hander I also found it perfectly pleasant. A nice touch is that holding the text zoom button for a few seconds changes the display from portrait to landscape, and vice versa.

Altogether I’m impressed with the PRS-505, both for reading e-books and as a convenient way of transporting and reading my own documents.