Quote:
Originally Posted by Peto
Anybody knows how long it took Sony to release the first 500 firmware update after the reader was launched? Could give us an idea about what to expect...
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The first time it took a couple of months. So, I don't think it could give us an idea. Or it could give us a different idea. It seems that Sony, while trying to port the DE reader into the PRS-505 environment, hit some brick walls, which cannot be resolved without some serious hardware upgrade. This is just my guess, not a rumor or anything.
The thing is, for most of us the Reader seems to work decently as is. Its PDF performance totally sucks, so people have learned how to live without PDF. The major update was supposed to come from Adobe, the people who already brought to us the unusable PDF viewer. If the performance of the DE viewer was even worse or the same, it would have been totally unusable, worthless.
So, the rumor mongers told us about some software (or some private version or eBookLib) that knows how to reflow PDFs, and handles DE. And it was all great and fine, except they only saw it run on a PC, not on the Reader. And my personal suspicion is, that this monster of a software
cannot run on the Reader. Or it takes 15 seconds to turn a page. Or it hangs the reader for 20 minutes, while loading a book. Or something like that.
The previous (PRS-500) firmware updates never expanded functionality, they were rather small
fixes, which still managed to break things (the first update broke the battery meter, so they had to issue the second update, which fixed it). Like many hardware companies, Sony seems uninterested in supporting and giving new features to existing customers. And Amazon is no better - I don't believe there has been a single functionality upgrade from them yet. The PRS-505 has been released, now it's time to throw the resources on to the PRS-510 or whatever is around the corner, so to make your "base" want to upgrade to the new better gadget a year from now. Why would you give them something for free when you can charge them for the new Reader?
So, there is nothing to release. The sales people ("managers" - right, every one of them is a manager) at the CES once again showed us their word was worth nothing, they are not informed, they just BS and make themselves look important...
The other possibility of course is that Sony/Adobe got it all up and running and good on the Reader, but they don't have any DE books to sell in the Connect Store, so they are waiting for Connect Store to ramp up the supply of DEs... I somehow believe this is not the case.