Quote:
Originally Posted by kacir
Regular visitors on this forum know that I do not like the Sony Company.
Yet, after months of careful reading of this forum and months of deliberation I have decided to buy (and import) Sony reader PRS500. That was almost a year ago. And I am a very, very happy owner.
I tell you why there are no firmware updates. The reason is simple. Very simple. The Reader JUST WORKS (Tm).
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Not sure I'd agree that "the Reader JUST WORKS". I love my reader and find it to be very usable in most cases, but there are some not so 'fringe' usecases where I'm not too pleased:
Perhaps it's just my model, but the first two books I read after purchasing my 505 were Anna Karenina and War and Peace. Both of these books were quite large. Opening War and Peace takes about a minute. Changing zoom level takes about a minute. I suppose you can argue that this isn't a bug but, I wouldn't mind some performance improvements. That said once the book is open it works quite well. In general I'm a big fan of the reader, I just wish that Anna Karenina wasn't the first title in the list since when I show it to someone they almost always attempt to open it ... and they immediately get a really bad impression of the reader.
I've also found that using an SD card tanks battery life. If I leave the reader in standby with an SD card inserted battery will run out in about 3 days (even if I don't use the book) instead of about 2 weeks sans SD. I'd say in general power consumption in standby could use some work ... I'm nowhere near 8000 page turns. I think I probably get more like 500 page turns.
I'd also point out that RTF support is pretty buggy. I've only been successful with the most basic RTF documents. Many RTF docs that I've tried simply won't display in the reader which is a shame because I'd love to be able to store work documents (e.g. MS Word as RTF) on the device as well.
Beyond that PDF support isn't too hot either. Reading a page in portrait mode is pretty uncomfortable since the text comes out too small, and switching to landscape mode everytime I want to read a PDF is a bit cumbersome. Again user friendly PDF support would be a big plus for storing work documents.
I'd also agree with other users' comments that the flat directory system is a little bit weak. Either a hierarchical system, or some sort of support for categorized library access (e.g. fiction, non-fiction, reference, recipes, work, school etc...) would be more useful.