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Old 06-04-2008, 04:48 PM   #143
porkupan
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Posts: 556
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Join Date: Sep 2006
Location: North Eastern U.S.
Device: Sony Reader
Quote:
Originally Posted by akiburis View Post
Well, no. People have reported, here at MobileRead and elsewhere, seeing public demonstrations of reflowing PDF and epub display on the Reader, not only on a PC.
Well, I'll believe it when I see it. What I read was the head message in this thread, about some "experimental" firmware that was supposedly demoed by some "Sony Reader product manager" at the CES. It even had the book list sorted alphabetically!

Come on, do you always believe that the sales people know about what they are selling more than you do? I usually find quite the opposite to be true. I am sure there are some experimental firmwares out there. Do they have a working PDF reflow? I doubt it. I know one can come up with PDFs, which will look much better on the Reader than your average PDF. And the sales people are not fools, they will demo a well formatted (fast web view) PDF, not just any PDF.

So, I'll tell you what I think. The next gen hardware will be ready somewhere in mid-summer. But the developers need a platform to develop to, so they develop to the PRS-505, with the assumption that they will port the firmware to PRS-510 once the hardware becomes available. Unless those new features will mean potential increase in sales volume or new ebook sales there is absolutely no business reason to make the FW updates available for the PRS-505, none! And the readers are already selling rather well.

I'll give you an example - the "Canadian" Reader. It has a different FW version, but absolutely no new features, fixes, etc. Sony is loading a "different" firmware on the Readers - why didn't they at least include the super-simple feature "delete a book" in it? I understand, the EPUB is "not ready", but "delete a book" should be totally independent of that, pure script. But they didn't even bother with that - just went and changed the version number in kconfig.xml file (so eBookLib can recognize it's a Canadian version, not the U.S. one). This tells me there is no "new firmware", and none is planned. I'll be happy to be proven wrong.
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