[delphin]

It don't think it was just that the readers themselves were understocked, because even some of the 3rd party accessory items eventually started selling out.

In other words -

"Yes, Virginia, the PRS-650 IS that good"

I have family members with both the Sony PRS-650 and Kindle 3, and after evaluating both side by side, for me the choice wasn't even close, the PRS-650 wins hands down.

When you think of the Sony PRS-650 vs Kindle 3, think early Macintosh vs MS-DOS

Like the early Mac, the PRS-650 has a small razor sharp monochrome screen with an extremely simple and user friendly GUI interface (Actually, in fairness, the Sony is a bit MORE sophisticated than early Macs, because it sports a state of the art touch screen interface.)

The Kindle 3 on the other hand, has a user interface that is like one of the sadder examples of the MS-DOS era. Skimpy graphics, badly arranged menus; cursor keys and underlines jumping around all over the place to make selections . . .

And from what I could see, the 'extra goodies' that Kindle offers to spice up the deal, like "text-to-speech" don't work well enough to bother with.

The text-to-speech plods along in a poor quality robo-voice monotone and mispronounces a word on about every third page. To make matters worse, it can be completely disabled by greedy publishers so it won't work at all for some Kindle titles.

The Kindle 3's so called built in MP3 audio player feature is the worst piece of garbage that I have ever seen, bar none.

Believe it or not you can't even select tracks for MP3 music files! There is a much ballyhooed "Hack" that gets around this by placing your MP3 music files in the "Audible" folder so they will show up in your book list, but it's still garbage, because then the Kindle just lets you play them ONE and ONLY ONE track at at time! (forget 'normal', 'shuffle', etc. in this mode, it won't even advance to the next track at all!)

Kindle 3 will also not work well for generic MP3 audio books divided into short chapter-by-chapter MP3 files, because you will have to load every short segment manually from your main 'home' booklist. Obviously, to get around this, you might want to use only audio books formated as a full-cd-per-track or even longer full-book-as-one-file. Unfortunately, the stupid Kindle 3's MP3 audio book player still has a major gotcha waiting, because then it takes FOREVER to try to find your place in a long MP3 track. This is because the skip forward/back track positioning feature on the Kindle 3 only skips forward or back by 30 seconds, and to do this you have to navigate through several key presses EACH TIME you want to skip forward or back (so to get to the middle of a 78 minute cd-length MP3 track will require literally hundreds of keystrokes).

The audio book playback controls also include some arrows that are supposed to skip to the next 'section' of your audio book, but it looks like they only work with official 'Audible' content that contains some kind of special TOC info. So if you are trying to play a generic unprotected MP3 audio book, forget about it, these arrows don't do anything (Logically, in the case of unprotected MP3's formatted without Audibles special TOC or Chapter tags, these arrows should just let you skip to the next track like every other MP3 player on the planet, but apparently Amazon was too stupid to figure this out)

Also if you use the 'hack' to get around the lack of track selection for Music MP3 by also placing them in the 'Audible' folder on the Kindle 3, FORGET ABOUT "LISTEN AS YOU READ" (because you can't read and play files from the "Audible" folder at the same time.)

No wonder Amazon calls almost everything on Kindle except very basic book reading "Experimental".

Sorry Amazon, I want a nice flexible open product with a high quality polished GUI interface, not some Amazon geek's locked down half finished science project.

By way of comparison, the Sony PRS-650's built in MP3 player properly organizes your MP3s using album title and track tags for both Musical Albums and Audio Books (including support for embedded cover art!). And of course on the PRS-650, you can pull up the album/track selection option while reading, play audio, select tracks, and read without loosing your place. You can even load an audio book MP3 and the same titles EPUB and read and listen at the same time if you want.

Of course since MobileRead is an Ebook forum, not a dedicated audio-book forum, some of these MP3 limitations may not be major issues for users here, but the point I am making is that this simi-flaky unpolished work-in-progress flavor pervades nearly EVERYTHING about the Kindle 3, including some of it's book reader features.

For example, Amazon didn't see fit to include numbers on the keyboard (not even as shifted characters), so you have to use the stupid arrow keys to navigate this cumbersome 'virtual' on-screen keyboard for numbers. This makes entering one of those long 128 bit WEP Hex keys about as much fun as getting a root canal without anesthetic.

And since nearly EVERYTHING revolves around that all-important "5 way" control on the right side of the Kindle 3's keyboard, would someone please explain to me why Amazon chose to make it SO FRIGGIN SMALL??? Larger buttons would have fit, and been MUCH easier to use - so as they say "waz up wih dat?"

The one shining exception to the flaky-feature rule is of course the "Kindle Store". Naturally, the "Kindle Store" feature of the Kindle 3 works just fine, because Amazon wanted to make really, really, sure that NOTHING would get in the way of your spending as much money as possible on Amazon.

Frankly, "The Kindle Store" isn't a big plus for me. I used to like Amazon, and still shop there for other products (indeed I bought my PRS-650 from one of their vendors), but I won't buy ebooks from them - EVER. Not unless Amazon stops playing monopolistic restraint-of-trade games and starts selling EPUB (so non-kindle owners can buy Amazon Ebooks) and opens the Kindle to Epub and Adobe ADE (so Kindle owners can use non-Amazon Ebooks).

Would you buy a DVD or BluRay player from Best Buy if it could ONLY play DVDs or BluRay disks that you purchased in THEIR STORE. Of course not!

I do think the Sony reader is just a bit overpriced, but in fairness, knowing a little about the infrared touch screen technology Sony is using, I suspect that it doesn't come cheap (and from my perspective, it was worth EVERY PENNY)

On the plus side, to help offset the cost, at least Sony does fully support Adobe ADE so I can check out DRM protected EPUB titles from my local library using Overdrive and read them for free.

At last count, I have checked out more than 30 titles from my local library using Overdrive/ADE, and that's about 300 bucks I won't be giving Amazon, which makes me feel just a little better about the $199 that I paid for my PRS-650.

Closing Thoughts

In closing let me add that, although I didn't like the Kindle much, I can see that it would meet some peoples needs. If your main goal is to be able to seamlessly buy books on Amazon, open them, and read, then the Kindle will do a fine job.

For me though, having the more user friendly touch screen interface is really important, because I like to also use some of the publicly available book sites like feedbooks, which offers literally thousands of free public domain titles, and in sorting out the wheat from the chaff, it's important to me that my reader makes browsing through a large numbers of titles as pleasant as possible (even after thousands of titles are loaded on the reader.)

I currently have over 1250 titles on my PRS-650, and am happy to report that it's still going strong, and just as I had hoped, the touch screen interface is a joy to use, even with this large number of titles.