Quote:
Originally Posted by acidzebra
I'm very disappointed that my 505, even with the latest update, won't bring me coffee in the morning. I heard the 510 will totally do this after the latest firmware update, and knowing this has made my 505 completely worthless.
You left out an option in the poll:
"My reader still performs the functions that I bought it for initially and I will happily continue to use it"
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This is entirely true. Sony was 100% unable to put the updates they put on the 505 onto the 500. Their choice was not "We can either put it on both of the devices, or we can only put it on the 505 just to screw over the early adopters," it was "These features will only work on the 505, that's too bad." I mean, would you rather have them not release any updates at all just so that your 500 has a similar feature set to the 505?
You may say that "the software ones wouldn't have been that hard," but this statement lacks credibility unless you are a professional industrial engineer. Or, even if you were, it would be quite a stretch to make claims unless you were a member of the PRS's design team. Things may seem easy (and in all probability the unicode support you mentioned, among other things, would be easy and can be attributed to Sony's misguided attempts to keep things simple) there may be serious physical limitations to processor power, memory limits, and battery life that would keep certain functions like PDF reflow from being feasible. The truth is, we just don't have all the information.
Specifically in regards to the desire for "proper pdf reflow support" being necessary, this is true as far as the concept that an enhanced method of optimizing fixed aspect ration PDFs for smaller screens would be a useful feature, but the sentiment falls apart beyond that. This is because there is no such thing as "proper pdf reflow". PDFs aren't
supposed to be reflowed and Sony's method of doing it amounts to nothing more than a clever hack. So far all the PDFs I've tested have been given greatly improved readability by the reflow, but they've also had swaths of blank or one character long pages among other aesthetic problems. To say that PDF reflow support "lacking" is a stretch because before Sony created this little workaround there was
no such thing as PDF reflow and even now that there is it is far from perfect. The absolute whole of the matter when the 500 came out and the absolute whole of the matter now is that A4 formatted PDFs will
never be perfectly readable on a small screen and disparaging Sony for this lack is naive at Beth. Furthermore it is very likely that this unconventional and, in all truth, rather sloppy method of doing advanced graphics manipulation is a perfect example of a function that is too processor intensive to be truly useful on the 500 as it would likely take
much longer than it does on the 505 and eat the batter more quickly than would be desirable.
Updates are still entirely possible with the 500, just not these specific ones – asking for these features in the 500 is like buying a 505 now and when the 515 comes out in 5 years with a color screen, saying, "Sony should have
known that this would happen, why didn't they put this in
my device?" Sony does know. Everybody knows that technology will improve, but it has to be taken in steps. Hopefully someday some general improvements will be released for it, but it just can't support the killer features of the new 505 update.
I will say that I would be a little disappointed if Sony never updates the 500, but it would be far from anything to complain about, and was 100% foreseeable for anyone who bought the device in the first place. Technology moves forward at an astounding rate, nobody expects their Apple ][s to be able to hook up to a broadband internet connection or play Doom 3, but they continue to admirably perform the functions that they were originally intended for. Dedicated ebook readers are a radically new niche market – not to mention that e-ink itself is a very young technology in its own right – and anybody who bought one in the first round of readers — hell, anyone who's buying them
now – should be aware that they will not do the same things as the products that will be available next year.
To close, I reiterate that, while it is unfortunate that the new updates to the 505
couldn't be put on the 500, owners of the 500 should have foreseen this and should keep in mind that their device is not obsolete, it is merely older, and that what's important is that Sony is still supporting the reader line at all. You might say that it's easy for me to say, considering that I have a 505 and am greatly enjoying the new features in the update, but then again, I fully expect it to be "made obsolete," but I will not mind, because that would be an absolutely boneheaded position to take.