I visited the SonyStyle store in Phoenix, AZ on Saturday so I could get some hands-on time with the PRS-700. I've owned a PRS-500 since the first few weeks they were available from Sony, and it has traveled everywhere with me for the past two years.
The Reader Revolution guy was there, and we got to chat for about 30 minutes. Unfortunately, he didn't have much nice to say about the PRS-700, which surprised me.
On first look/touch, I remember thinking, "Ooh, pretty". It seemed responsive to initial touch, albeit, pretty fingerprinted up. Then I pulled out my PRS-500 and he brought over his PRS-505 and we compared screens. That's where the big difference came in from what I could see.
The screen on the 700 is nowhere near as sharp as the one on the 505, I'm guessing that's due to the lights and the touchscreen. The 505 had MUCH better contrast than both my 500 and the 700 that was on display.
Then he started playing with the 700 by flexing it slightly on diagonal corners. This triggered the screen to start flipping pages randomly, changing font size, highlighting certain regions -- he wasn't flexing it too hard from what I could tell, either. He tried to highlight a passage with the stylus and the response time was sluggish and several times ended up turning the page instead of highlighting the text. He said the battery time was nowhere near what the 505 gets, he said five hours, but that *has* to be with full lights on all the time...that seems awfully short.
The front-light LED's in typical store lighting were uneven in lighting the screen. You could see where the eight or so front lights illuminated the page, and the gaps in illumination. Who knows though, that could look great with all the lights off.
In the end, after getting to play with the 505 and the 700, I left my well-loved, trusty old PRS-500 Reader in their care and traded up to the PRS-505 with the Sony trade-in plan. I have tons of booklights from the past two years of using my Sony Reader in the dark, I don't really need a front-light. The touchscreen response was a bit disappointing. Really, I couldn't justify paying $400 for that particular model.
I really wanted to like it too... had it met expectations, I'd have immediately pre-ordered from Sony and waited with anticipation. Oh well, I'm now the proud owner of a gorgeous silver PRS-505
