[RobW]

I have been using my Sony PRS-650 for over 6 months now and having read several books on it to date I feel I am in a good position to review it. I was toying with the idea of whether to divide my review into harware/software or good/bad points but as a matter of fact the hardware features pretty much line up with the good points and software with the bad.

First the hardware:

I chose the Sony ebook reader because I really objected to getting tied in with Amazon's proprietary e-book system. I liked the idea of Epub and it looked as if a lot of content was going to start being issued in epub format. After all Google are scanning a thousands of books into epub format so I could be assured of a huge, free library. My main interest in ebook readers has always been for for reading the content I download free from the web. If I want to buy a book, I'll get a second-hand paperback via Amazon which in many cases is cheaper than the ebook equivalent.

The hardware of the Sony is attractive and looks very rubust - unlike the plastic Kindle, which to me feels cheap and tacky. I like the quality of the build and the screen is very easy to read with a comfortable page-turn refresh. What put me off earier models was the migraine-inducing flash you got between pages. There is still room for improvement but it's pretty comfortable now.

The battery life is huge. The problem is that it lasts so long that you never bother to charge it and then suddenly find it's run out. But that's not a complaint.

The touch screen, which I could live without, is a nice-to-have. I like the way you can configure it for a left or right stroke to turn the page.

I like the way the device wakes up almost immediately you switch on and it's nice to be able to put your own cover pic on it. It would be better if it had colour display but I dont think that's a crucial feature. One can easily cope with reading text in simple black and white. We've been doing it for centuries.

The main problem I have experienced with the hardware is a small spot on the screen, 2 or 3 millimetres wide, where the coating on the inside surface of the screen appears to have come away. This leaves a small spot in the middle of the screen which is somewhat irritating. It leaves me with the question of how robust the screen actually is. I have been very careful about how I have treated the reader, avoiding placing objects on the screen and I have never dropped it so it's a puzzle how this spot developed. There is no indentation on the surface of the screen so it has not been scratched by a sharp object. I wonder if other owners have likewise experienced damaged screens.

The weight and size of the reader is very comfortable. I originally intended to get the pocket version but that was far too small to read comfortably. However, I feel that the 650 is also too small. It should have a screen commensurate with a real book - say about A5 size. That way you could read books with illustrations actually in the text. The screen size of the 650 is smaller than A6 and I could not find a 'real' book in my collection that was as small.

I liked the fact that while the e-reader has a large 2Gb storage capacity it also has a slot for an SD card so you can expand its capacity. However, in practice I have found the 2Gb more than enough. I currently have about 300 books on my Sony so the expansion slot is probably redundant as I assume most people like me would keep their library on their PC and only cover over the books they are currently reading.

The software:

In general the software design is awful. It is very complicated to navigate your way thru the system and has the appearace of a quick afterthought, once they got the hardware sorted, in order to rush to market. I very much doubt if it was user-tested.

Notes are difficult to enter using the on-screen keyboard and bookmarks almost impossible to delete given the convoluted set of clicks you have to go thru. I like the ability to highlight text, altho it can be fiddly. Under certain circumstances where you drag the stylus too near the edge of the page while highlighting you can freeze the whole device. Notes entered against a text highlight cannnot be exported in plain text which rather defeats the object from my point of view.

The handwriting recognition system is like a child's toy and a complete waste of time. One feels a lot of work has gone into developing something very clever which gives no advantage over a pencil and a scrap of paper.

The pictures display is dreadful so why bother with it? Transitions are of the migraine-inducing kind mentioned above. I suppose it was thrown in because you need to display images in the text and you must list a pile of 'features' to make people feel they are getting their money's worth. However, there are lots of much better devices on the market for displaying pictures, I can't see anyone bothering to use their e-reader. Sometimes less really is more.

The dictionary lookup is a great feature which I used a lot until my dictionary just disappeared. One day it just wasn't there any more!

The audio works well but I already have an MP3 player so I have not really had much use for it on the book reader. It looks like a feature that has just been thrown in to bulk out the product.

The Sony Reader Library software that is supplied with the e-reader has proved completely unusable. I found that if I wanted to put a single book on the device it literally took hours to synchronise (and I literally mean literally in this context). I am not sure how it works but it looks to me as if it re-copies every single book each time you connect to it. I have therefore taken to using drag and drop straight onto the device, which is much cleaner and easier, and I use Adobe Digital Editions to get protected books onto the device. Following dropping books onto the device and restarting it, there is a short delay while it appears to re-index itself but this is acceptable and does not cause any problems.

While the quality of the screen display is very good - I can vouch for the ability to read it in bright sunlight - the text display software is poor. You have very little choice of fonts-faces and sizes. The margins cannot be adjusted and there is no micro-justification of the text, which I think is really poor design. It therefore does not match the quality of a paper book by a long way.

One of the main purposes of having an e-reader is the ability to carry a lot of books around with you and therefore it needs good indexing and listing of contents. However, it fails miserably on both counts. I particularly dislike the way you cannot group books using the folder system. Whatever folders you put on the internal drive it ignores the structure and displays everything as a flat list. You have to categorise everything on the device itself which is impracticable if you have a large collection of several hundred books (and you only need to categorise your books if you have a large collection!) The other feature I really dislike is the contents listing. You can have two settings. One displays little thumbnails of the book cover, if it has one. The thumbnails are so small that they tell you nothing about the book and drastically reduce the number of titles you can list. The other setting lists the titles in a large font, only allowing one line per title. Consequently long titles are truncated making it difficult to read titles.

Content:

I like the fact that you can read RTF files and well as epub books on the device. This is very conventient as it means you can put your own content on the reader. However, because user-configuration is limited you cannot just put standard docs on the device. You have to format them specially with a large font to render them readable.

There are several sources of free epub books but the quality leaves much to be desired. They are often riddled with typos and other errors. The Google ebooks are a particularly egregious in this respect. I am amazed they have the cheek to publish them.

Some public libraries provide access to epub books via their website. My county library in Kent, UK, provides a very good service but even commercial ebooks can me problematic at times. In one case a commercial book I was reading kept jumping sections for no apparant reason. On another occasion I actually *bought* a book from an on-line supplier (Yes, I actually spent real money on a book!) and it would not display on the reader. Later I downloaded a decrypter and took the file apart only to find that one of the sections was over 3Mb which exceeds the limit that Sony Readers can cope with. The book was quite reabable on a desktop reader.

My conclusions? Wait a few more years. The devices are not good enough yet. Or perhaps try a Kindle. The Kindle is much cheaper and I notice that they price of their e-books is coming down.

Rob Wheeler
Faversham, UK