I've been reading mobileread forums in past 2 weeks researching which reader to get.
I had Sony PRS-900 and Sony PRS-300. I sold PRS-900 and decided to get PRS-350 for my wife. Now that we used it for past 2 days, my PRS-300 is up in the flea market section
Overall impressions are very positive. New screen, size and speed are very impressive. Screen looks much better than PRS-900 with its touch screen overlay and it does look better than PRS-300. Speed of page turns is amazing, prs-300 is a turtle compared to 350. New interface is also very nice. Now i have to decide whether to get PRS-650 or another 350 for myself.
But back to the topic
I seem to be reading a lot of posts comparing price of kindle vs. sony. Yes Sony forgot to get the memo and priced their readers too high but Sony does have few advantages. First and foremost is the touch interface. It is so much better than kindle. Amazon should really come up with touch interface for the kindles. I use to have Kindle a while ago and the non touch interface was really crappy. One main example is dictionary look up. The way you had to scroll with kindle's navigation keys took the fun out of looking up words. With Sony you just lightly double tap on the word and magic
Second and main reason is the openness of Sony readers. Support of Epub and integration with library are awesome. You are not locked into amazon store and I actually had first hand experience with it.
I came across a book I wanted to read "Medium Raw". Speaking completely without using "black ops" and from regular user's point of view here is how I saved money. If I had kindle, I would have to pay $12.99 + tax for the privilege of reading the book I wanted to read.
With Sony, I went to the Brooklyn Public Library website, added book to my ecart and checked it out. Took less than 2 minutes and I had book loaded on my PRS-350 for next 14 days of reading it, completely free. So with just one book I saved $13. So it is true that Sony readers have a premium in terms of price, but in the long run you can actually end up paying a lot less for it than with Kindle
So moral of the story
Even though Amazon priced kindle very attractively in the long run you may end up spending more money in content on the Kindle than on Sony. Sony's marketing department needs to make this known for its potential buyers.
Alex