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Originally Posted by HarryT
Those correspond to the countries in which Sony have launched the Reader. It's not yet been released in Spain.
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I guess I'm surprised they have decided not to have an initial release in Spanish-speaking countries.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Darqref
Looking at these pictures, it appears that the central 4-way button is larger on the 300. Do you find this any easier to manipulate? do the parts of the button actually have a wider "effective area" or are the places you need to press just a bit farther from each other?
My Gen3 has a 4-way that must be pressed inside of the hole through the case, and I end up hitting the central button fairly often. (and I broke the screen once, so I read with it in the case.) When I tried a 505 in the store at Fry's, it seems *better*, but still not great. If the 300 is actually larger, then it might be even better than the 505 (and probably loads better than the gen3)
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The larger button on the 300 is easier to hit--you can press towards the rim or towards the center. I did notice that sometimes, when using just my left hand and reaching over with my thumb, that I occasionally hit the center button or both center and left by mistake. Shifting my thumb over (or up from the bottom rather than from the left side) takes care of this when my hand position 'wanders.'
WRT the displays, the e-ink does have sub-capsule differentiation capability. I looked at the web pages linked by LDBoblo, and I looked again at my e-ink devices under higher mag. First, let me say that the 300 display looks nothing like the images on the Kindle "optimizer" page. This is with normal font size, 21 lines on the screen with header and footer. The only place I see a hint of gray edge is on something like a period or dot of an "i." The gray edges are slightly more noticeable on the 505 display, but still nowhere near as blurred as on the Kindle page. (I interpreted this as the sub-capsule addressing rather than anti-aliasing, because I don't see a multitude of grays on text edges of the 300 display.)
Close-up (much closer than normal reading distance!), both text outlines look at least as sharp as that of ink on regular paperback paper (better than my older paperbacks), even though the p-ink appears slightly blacker than e-ink. I would also point out, at higher mag, that the 300 display is noticeably sharper than the 505 display (although the difference isn't really noticeable to me from normal reading distance, and barely discernible from a couple of inches away). I'm not sure if this is because the newer e-ink displays are improved, the smaller e-pixel size/higher density of the 5" display, or the fact that my 300 display has been used much less than the 505 display (but is steadily catching up now
). In any case, neither Reader display looks anything close to "old soggy newsprint" (I still interpret that as an inaccurate, trollish/snarky comment, btw) and in fact they appear as sharp as ink-on-paper in my older (slightly yellowed) paperbacks, which have a similar contrast. I'm sure glossy white paper has sharper letter edges and higher contrast, but it also has more glare than the e-ink displays, in my experience.
As mentioned in my original post, the contrast is slightly better tin the 300 than the 505 (perhaps an improved display, perhaps just a newer display with whiter background). And under higher mag, the same-sized text does have slightly sharper edges on the 300 than on the 505. Neither looks any worse than an old paperback under normal reading conditions. And neither looks nearly as fuzzy as the images on the Kindle Optimizer webpage (which seems to be based on the early older e-ink displays).
Of course, some people can continue to gripe about the microscopic 'shortcomings' of their e-ink devices. (Snarking and nitpicking
is pretty cool on the internet, y'know?) I will just continue to comfortably read books on my Readers, and am still happy to answer specific questions about the 300.
