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I think many mp3 players do, in fact, have the same kinds of problem -- the whole Apple range, for a start. But the problems are not all that noticeable, because the speed of the user interface is much, much faster, as is the speed of the CPU. The limitation on the PRS, I think, is that in order to maintain the phenomenal battery life, the CPU clocks over at 150MHz or thereabouts -- way slower even than an MP3 player.
When you put a memory card in, the PRS has to examine each file, parse out the metadata (if there is any), and build it's own internal indexes. That's going to take a long time with such slow hardware.
Although this wouldn't be to everyone's taste, it would suit me if the PRS just `lost' this indexing feature altogether, and let me put files into a folder layout of my choice. That would solve the navigation and card-scanning problems both at a stroke. But I appreciate that many people like to use metadata for organization.
But I have two high-capacity MP3 players from different vendors (Archos and Cowon) and both manage to offer both methods to users. It shouldn't be that difficult for Sony to do so. My gut feeling is that it isn't a limitation in the PRS that prevents this being implemented, but more likely a limitation of the Sony PC software or the protocol it uses to communicate with the reader. The ability to treat the PRS storage as disk-like (with folders, etc) is a new thing in the 505 -- the 500 could not. So perhaps it's the PC software that's holding back Sony from doing the right thing on the reader?
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