Smart Bitches, Trashy Books

Sony 700 Review: A Report from Laura

by SB Sarah | September 20, 2009 | Sunday at 9:35 pm | 5 Comments I've had a couple of weeks to spend with my borrowed toy, and here's my impressions, based on my unscientific but personally demanding testing methods.

Overall, I like it, but the technology still has some serious limitations that keep it from being a serious solution for my personal library growth issues. I knew there would be a learning curve, so I gave myself several days to just play with it. I tried a couple of freebie downloads, but really wasn't warming up to the e-paper format at all. Then I downloaded the new Jeaniene Frost release I'd been dying to read. For the first few pages, the flicker of the entire page at the 'page turn' drove me nuts. And then, I quit noticing. Somehow. I was reading along, completely sucked into the story, and I lost half an hour. Poof! Gone! I was well into the book by then and had ceased to even notice I was doing the page turn thing.

Yep, I was warming up to the Sony PRS-700. Still . . . my wish list for the perfect e-reader goes something like this --

1) I want --- a high-contrast screen with that's usable in sun, shade, and at 3 a.m. in a darkened room with the dh snoring through my insomnia. Preferably without the eye strain since I get enough of that staring at the computer monitor for hours at a stretch. The 700 gets a big thumbs up in this category. My only complaint would be the handy backlight for reading in the wee hours really sucks down the battery, which means I actually have to remember to plug back in to recharge. Like I need one more thing to remember . . . not that this is much of an issue for the new buyer since the 700 has now been discontinued and the newly announced models have no backlight.

2. I want -- a high-res color display that does justice to the high-res photos that make nature guides so handy. This would allow me to haul one slim little device down the road to the prairie conservation area or up the other way to the river. One slim little device would fit in my big camera bag without adding noticeably to the back strain involved in schlepping all that gear around. But alas, the Sony with its relatively low-res screen isn't anywhere close to replacing that two-foot stack of books that tell me half of everything I need to know about the marvels I encounter in the wilds. A million kisses for whoever finally figures out how to marry the eye-friendly e-paper screen of Sony readers with the color & photo clarity of my PDA -- at a purse-friendly price, of course.

3. I want -- a software interface that installs with a minimum of fuss and just works. Thus far, the Sony eLibrary software gets a big MEH. More precisely, the software interface with the Sony eStore sucks big warty toads. I first thought the problem was my satellite internet. It can be quirky and fussy. But nope, I tested that theory by browsing the Sony store side-by-side in Microsoft Explorer and the Sony eLibrary software, comparing performance. Ugh! The Sony software side was so embarrassed by its slow, stuttering performance that it just locked up and refused to play. Twice. Once it froze my entire computer, not just the eLibrary software, and I had to reboot. That's a first on this computer, which is a nice 64-bit machine with enough power and memory to make me very happy.

However, I had no trouble transferring e-books to the device after downloading from any other source. (With a caveat about previously purchased PDF format ebooks with DRM protections - that's a whole other dance.) I even downloaded a massive digital file of an 1870s-era history tome that was more than 600 pages long in print. The file was, unfortunately, all PDF images. It was easily viewable on the Sony PRS-700, but in really tiny print. The Zoom function made the text readable, theoretically. The letters were easy to read, but navigating to the next part of the page was so painfully slow that I'd rather poke sticks in my eye than try to read the book this way or actually use it for research. Which is what I'd planned to do, get ahead on my research for an upcoming project. Sob - there goes one of my dreams - lying awake at 3 a.m., engrossed in the digital version of the 1875 History of Missouri - trust me, it's a page turner if you're into that sort of thing.

(Note to self - test with smaller file to see if it happens on all PDFs or just the really, really fat documents.)

Still, I'm finding the Sony PRS-700 much more useful than I'd expected. I was bummed to learn that the model had been discontinued. I'm not so interested in the recently announced 300 - a Pocket Reader with no touchscreen doesn't appeal. I want the option of highlighting, taking notes, and searching . . . so I'll probably take a look at the 600 when it hits the retail market.