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Originally Posted by oncdoc
i may go for the prs 505 if it drops below 200 dollars
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Quote:
Originally Posted by TMark
Looks like price is expected to drop and I'm going to get my hands on that 505 very soon.
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^ FYI guys Target has dropped the price of their Sony Prs-505 to 195 dollars.
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Originally Posted by koland
Isn't the cheaper (new) sony a 5" screen as well. So, the same price as a Kindle 1 (still available at Amazon), but thinner and with a smaller screen, no keyboard and no wireless and less selection. It doesn't really compete at all with the K2, if only due to the size, let alone the missing features. Seems mainly to be an attempt to capture the ipod crowd (most of whom want a backlit screen, as they have not yet realized the damage from years of using them and have other things to do outside besides reading) or the old palm pilot crowd (or it's aimed at the Japanese market, where the small size will make a huge difference -- they get all the cool, tiny computers there that we never see).
If Amazon wants the DX to be taken seriously in the educational market, they must add some type of categorization support -- this is both the simplest and fastest way to do so, as well as one of the most flexible. Playlists/collections and actual directory folders are both much more limited in use. If you have directories, a book can only exist in one place (unless you have multiple copies, each with it's own separate bookmarks that don't sync). Where to put that young adult paranormal romance? Do I look under Young Adult or Romance to find it? And then I'd probably want sub-folders under Romance, as well as most of the others.
For school use, folders would be adequate. I could dump each class' reading material into a single directory and use subfolders to further organize them. But for readers of fiction, they would be a poor substitute for true categorization. Even non-fiction readers would need to make some compromise decisions (all alphabetically, use library filing system, with it's arbitrary classification of crossover subjects, or what?).
Add to that, that with non-academic reading, we probably want to tag things with "read", "unread", "read next" and such, while still maintaining the other structure we've set up. And who wants to have to be moving the file around physically on the hard drive (which is what folders would entail), drilling into sub-directories to find the new location as we have finished reading a book. Instead, once you read a book, use the menu to edit the tags (I may not want to delete the book, as another reader in the house may not be finished).
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No one wants the Kindle 1 anymore that thing is an abomination to look at, you can only get it second hand, and the controls are not intuitive plus it only has 4 shades of gray. As for k2 competition, the sony prs-600 would be the most likely candidate. No one cared for the side lighting in the 700 so it was removed accordingly. Despite it not having wireless connection to a dedicated store, the main selling point for sony readers is that they use somewhat of an open system and natively support multiple formats. Most of the people that steer away from the kindle are those who hate DRM and don't want to buy books that can only be read on one device. With sony readers you have options aside from the sony store. May not be as convenient but still an option nonetheless. Honesty I tried the 600 and didn't like it because the clarity wasn't as sharp as the 505 or kindle 2 because of the touch screen but that only becomes apparent via comparison. If the 600 was the only ereader you've ever used, you'd probably never notice it.
As for the DX in educational settings, it already got it's first failing grade. The kindle DX was said to be a "poor excuse of an educational tool" by a student in a test pilot using the kindle in replacement of textbooks. IMHO it will never replace textbooks because you can't have multiple books open at the same time and jump between pages rapidly. It also isn't as easy to annotate or highlight... I love ereaders but I don't think they will ever replace textbooks anytime soon.
http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/28/k...-in-princeton/