[ProDigit]

If what's been said about the touchscreen on the device is true, then I think the touchscreen is far better than the other type of touchscreens used (plastic layer over glass, the so called 'soft touch' touchscreens).
If the display doesn't really produce a 100% accurate positioning of the pen on the touchscreen,that could be a calibration issue,or in worst case a driver issue.

I don't really think that the touchscreen is really the issue why Sony didn't incorporate handwriting recognition in the device.
I think it has several reasons:
1- It needs a handwriting recognition dictionary software inside, which on average uses up between 80MB for latin and 200MB for Chinese-type letters, of diskspace (I know because my MP3 player had one).
On top of that the reader needed a local dictionary that contains lots of words (on average about 70.000 or more words per language), plus (software for) an additional dictionary entry for common or local words that need to be inputted by the user.

2- With a screen refresh rate of 0,8 fps you will most likely have written 2-3 letters before you can see whether or the system recognized the first letters or not.
And probably by the second word, the system will have found the first word you wrote.
A 200Mhz ARM processor (let's say, since we don't really know what it has) isn't really that fast, knowing that it's main purpose is to act as software graphic processor,sound engine, handwriting recognition, external drive host, and OS loader.

3- Battery life; if the cpu needs to decipher the handwriting, then find the word in the dictionary, that itself uses a lot of battery. Not only that, but it needs to update the user constantly on the screen (by refreshing the screen constantly).
If the device supports 8000 pageswaps per battery charge, and does 1 frame per 0,8 seconds (1,25fps), that would mean you would be able to handwrite (not calculating the power the cpu needs for handwriting) for 6400 seconds, or 106minutes, or 1,8 hours.
Battery life would definitely not be more than the iliad.

And I doubt the Sony PRS-700 is intelligent enough to do local page refreshing; meaning it will probably do a full pageswap, even if only 10% of the page is changed.
This is something we might see in the coming devices that could possibly increase display speed to a point where it's possible to watch a low-motion .mov file on a e-ink screen!
The .mov codec chops original video in blocks (a grid), and whenever a change in one of the blocks has been detected, it will refresh only that block; not the entire screen.
This form of 'intelligent' motion still can be applied to the B&W screens of e-ink,allowing a reduce in screen bandwidth, as well as a reduce in powerconsumption (or increase of battery life); by changing that part of the screen that really needs to be changed.


This made me wonder, and gathering information of the charger, batteries used in the 505, prediction on what battery Sony probably would use on the 700 series, powerdraw of the various elements like touchscreen and LEDs, made me wonder how much the 700 would have in battery life.
Most of this is rough sketches, and predictions on various hardware settings Sony could use. In no way whatever I write here is definite, or measured, but after some hours of research I came to the idea the battery life of the 700 could be less than the 505; even if Sony upped the battery.


The 700 without the LED's on might last longer than the 505 in battery life.
However when the leds are used continuously the batterylife of the 700 will certainly be not better than the Iliad!

Most data I could gather made it obvious that the LEDs the 700 uses, draw about half the power the 700 would draw to turn pages.
This could mean under normal usage without the leds you have plenty of battery, around the battery life of 505 (since the touchscreen doesn't really use that much power; about 1/30th of the device being active), but with the leds on continuously battery life can shrink to about 7 hours or less.

Of course, noone uses the LED's on continuously. So say you read 4 hours per day, and turn on the Leds 30minutes per day, that would result in a battery life of roughly half the battery life of the 505(talking about a few days of battery life; upto a week),
Though the 700's battery might be 25-30% stronger than the 505's battery.

Of course, there are too many variables in the game, but unless Sony upped the battery, you will end up with 2/3th the 505's battery without,and less than half the battery with occasional use of the Leds (all depending on use ofcourse).

Still, one could choose NOT to use the Leds, and end up with a device that possibly will last longer in battery than the 505 (provided sony upgraded the battery).

The touchscreen continuously draws power, less good when forgetting to turn the device off. But the power drain of the touchscreen should be relatively small compared to the LEDS.
Also relatively small to the drain the device has when swapping a page.
But the continuous drain is huge compared to the device in idle mode (the mode the 700 gets into right after a page has been loaded).

I'd put things in this order,with an average of powerdraw:

LEDS (1-1,2Watt)
E-reader swapping pages and browsing(0,8-1Watt)
SD/MMC Cardreader active(50-75mW)
touchscreen(5-35mW)
SD/MMC Cardreader passive (2-5mW)
E-reader passive (2-5mW)