Two Weeks With The PRS700
Once again, the Sony Reader Marketing team has kindly, and generously allowed one of your MobileRead Editors the opportunity to examine and review their latest offering in the PRS line. From the PRS500, through the PRS505, and now the PRS700.
Two weeks ago, when the review unit arrived, I transferred my current reading list over to it, and set aside my trusty PRS500. I figured that at this stage, when others have given the PRS700 a thorough treatment as far as specifications and basic operation go, the best "review" I can offer you is a hands-on "road test," so to speak, and the best way to do that was to commit to
using the 700 for as much of that time as I could.
Naturally, I will touch upon some hardware and software specific points, but within a context of how they affect the reading experience on the new device -- you already know the facts and figures, I'd like to try to convey what it's like to
use a PRS700.
Which means that the Reading experience is probably a good place to begin. In normal reading conditions, by that I mean without the front light turned on, I found the display on the 700 to actually have less contrast and clarity than that of the 500 (if it needs to be said: keep in mind that the 505's display is
more contrasty and clear than the 500's). Just like all e-ink, the contrastiness and clarity improve with brighter lighting conditions.
(I've attached some comparison pictures to illustrate the contrast and clarity differences. In taking the pictures I tried as much as possible to photograph both the 500 and the 700 in as close to exactly the same lighting, position, angle, distance and so on, as I could pull off -- I don't consider them identical, but they're pretty close.)
My impression of the contrast differences is much the same as that of others who have commented on the lower clarity: it seems to result from a combination of the touch-screen membrane, and the plastic involved in the front light. Just like everything else in the world, there's a trade-off for those feature set increases, in this case, it's a decrease in "regular lighting" readability. For all that, I found that after a couple of days, I didn't notice it much any more, and the overall readability is still quite good.
The other aspect (visually speaking) of the display that I'd like to remark on is that it is rather more prone to glare and reflections than the 500 or 505. It's the front light, again: in order to be read through, it has to be pretty transparent, which means more reflective. You can see in the third attached picture that there are some reflections on the display of the 700 that aren't there at all in the 500. Again, these were taken in more or less the same physical position beside a window, with the camera, photographer, and all lighting unmoved between them, and only a few tens of seconds time-space apart.
The glare and reflectance
are more noticeable on the 700 than the 500. What this means in practical terms is that the reader (the
person, that is) spends a bit more effort finding an angle where the display is free enough of glare and reflections to read from. In the interest of full disclosure, and being as accurate and informative as possible, I should acknowledge that I am a person who's rather sensitive to glare, so that you can consider that factor as well.
Something I'm
not particularly bothered by, however, is fingerprints. Sure if they're really bad they bother me, but I'm not a fanatic about it. That being said, the touchscreen on the 700
does show some fingerprinting. This can mostly be seen when catching light on the display. I am in the habit of
not handling electronics (especially
other people's electronics) unless my hands are fairly clean, but I still see streaking and printing on the screen when I turn it to a light.
Regarding the touch screen operation, and the display operation, since it's hard to really separate the two, I was most pleased. The response of the display refresh is very snappy, noticably faster than even a 505's refresh. The "swipe and hold" motion for rapidly skipping through pages is as fast as could be hoped, not quite too fast to follow with the naked eye. It's really surprising to see e-ink responding so quickly! I used this feature some for navigating Bible chapters, and it worked like a charm. The touch-screen selection of links greatly improved this operation as well, allowing me to reach a particular passage in a few seconds (as fast or faster than I could with paper) where it was a minute or longer operation on the 500. I can see this feature being useful for reference works such as a straight dictionary: links to the start (and maybe middle) of letters, and then skip through to find the page. Most pleasing.
The regular page turning was interesting, if not quite as straightforward. I should comment here about the touchscreen itself. While it will respond to a fingertip, it really responds best to something small and hard, such as the included stylus (which I didn't find a need for, very much) or the tip of a fingernail (which I used a
lot). What that means is that when using a fingertip, a firmer pressure was required, and a longer duration touch, to make the command register. Not
much pressure, you understand, just more. I did find myself mostly using the hard-buttons to change pages when reading one-handed: when sitting up, the "swipe" worked great, but the buttons seemed to be more convenient for me when lying down, and certainly when doing something else with the other hand.
The menu system is a marked improvement over the 500/505 menus, mostly thanks to the touchscreen control. Navigating between books was simple and straightforward, I even found myself accessing the settings menu to check the time (no in-book time display in the loaner unit, of course), it was so easy to navigate that I mostly did it without thinking about it, once it occurred to me that I could.
Also related to general navigation, I found the buttons to be very well thought out. The functions they access were the ones I found I needed. The Home button is nice, going straight back to the main menu with a single click, much better than the previous click-and-hold approach. The Options button is very useful, offering a set of options that changes based on where you are when you press it. It did take me a few days to really "get" that it was there and start using it, but after I did, I found it quite useful. The page and return buttons are obvious in their functions, and work about as you'd expect them to. From a purely functional/tactile point of view, I found them easy to find with my fingers and the clicks are crisp and definite.
The Bookmarks feature has grown into the Notes feature, and the list of all notes can be accessed directly from the main menu. I only ever had two or three notes running at a time, but I can see that this page might get cluttered pretty quickly for someone who takes lots of notes. However, since the list of notes for each book can be accessed from the book in question, that's probably not a big deal.
That brings us to note entry itself. I found that setting the bookmarks took a bit of getting used to, and
removing them a bit more still. They're set and removed by tapping twice at the upper right corner of the display. That tapping has to be done just right, or it launches into a note-entry mode rather than removing the mark. It's not difficult to get the hang of, but it's a bit frustrating until you do. In the interest of fairness, there's some possibility that the fact that this was a loaner may have been responsible for some of the finickiness there.
Note entry and searching worked nicely, though text entry for both is a bit cumbersome, due more to the layout of the on-screen keyboard than the e-ink's refresh rate (which, as I mentioned is quite snappy). Switching key sets to access numbers and symbols is a bit slow, but those wouldn't be used all that much by most folks.
Now on to the front light, and again, in full disclosure, my eyes seem to be more sensitive to light, so I don't require as much light as others often do to see to my satisfaction -- for reference I used the front lighting only on the lower of the two brightnesses. Others have mentioned that the lighting from it is uneven, and I found this to be the case myself. There is a noticeable decrease in illumination from the edges to the center of the page, the edges tend to be a bit brighter than I really preferred, and the center a bit dimmer, but I had no trouble reading any of it. The attached front light picture is blurry, but it represents the fade-off fairly well. One very nice touch on the front light is that it switches itself off when the Reader itself is switched off. An obvious touch, but a very nice one. It's good to see Sony not overlooking such details.
Related to the light, it
does seem to have an impact on the battery life. You should understand that I'm hopelessly spoiled by the approximately three weeks per charge I still get from my two-year-old PRS500, and that the unit I reviewed was a passed-around (and perhaps mildly abused) one, but it gave me about four days of use per charge. That's with about two hours of front light usage per day, and several hours of non-lit use besides. That's a fair step back from the earlier models, but still a fair amount of time per charge, particularly compared to non-e-ink devices.
I did try to refrain from using the light for a time to see what effect that would have, but circumstances conspired to interfere, and I found myself using it at night, so I don't really feel I got a good enough measure of non-lighted battery life to offer a meaningful comment on that. I
can point out that Sony specifies eight hours of usage with the light turned on, so my approximately two hours of light usage per day for four days,
plus some hours of usage each day
without the light is actually a good deal
better than the official specification.
My conclusions? I very much agree with Sony that the PRS700 is not a replacement for the PRS505: it has some very different strengths. The notation and faster access features ought to lend themselves fairly well to light research and reference functions, and it's still a very usable reading device.
My thought is that for a person who needs or wants those added features, or has a strong need or desire for the built-in front light could be very well pleased with the PRS700, and the person who primarily wants to read, without taking any sort of notes or doing any reference type functions with their reading device might prefer the PRS505.