PRS-600 Completely Froze

[kimknapp]

Sound like my experiences. This has nothing to do with the battery.
I think the control software is going off into bit heaven for a while and then finally coming back. I didn't see this with the old proprietary book software, I saw it a lot with pdf's and I have yet to see it with an ePub.
Speaking of pdf's, I saw the new Que up close and it looks like the right solution for pdf's! Very nice!!

[thed]

I had a new PRS700 freeze and it never cleared.

Fortunately it was still under warranty so I got a new one after about 2 weeks of wailing.

[whiskey212]

Had a similar issue and this is the third I have had with this issue. The first froze on the menu screen while loading from a memory card< and before you ask it was on both a MSDuo and various makes/sixes of SD and SDHC cards. It simply displays the round arrow icon in the middle of the screen and the "Loading..." at the bottom, for hours on end, LITERALLY. I went through the hard reset procedure and the device would no longer turn on. The second device was the same but I left it loading for a longer period and after over a day I gave up and took it back to the store. Now this third reader has done the same thing, it's been stuck loading for 4 hours now. IT IS NOT THE BATTERY. I have charged it for well over 6 hours of the last 8 and have yet to read a single page so there is no battery issue. I am about fed up with this piece of garbage and am about ready to return it and abandon eBooks altogether: I never had any problems with ink and paper books. All books on the device/cards are in either the ePub format or PDFs so there is no issue there. My computer will not recognize the reader to do anything from that angle either, so I'm left to conclude this is simply an inferior device as I am clearly not the only one with this device freezing on them. You all may say that it's an easy problem to fix with a reset, but in my case that's simply not true and even if it were it should not have to be reset constantly in order to be used. I believe there is something fundamentally wrong with this device.

[whiskey212]

The Que does look like a great device, sadly it looks to be running about $800-850 at release!

Originally Posted by kimknapp

Sound like my experiences. This has nothing to do with the battery.
I think the control software is going off into bit heaven for a while and then finally coming back. I didn't see this with the old proprietary book software, I saw it a lot with pdf's and I have yet to see it with an ePub.
Speaking of pdf's, I saw the new Que up close and it looks like the right solution for pdf's! Very nice!!

[kronium]

$650 for wifi only. The Skiff should be cool. At CES it was more responsive than the Que, and had color to boot. Sadly it won't be out till the end of the year. The Que is due in April

[elcreative]

Just as a matter of interest, how many books on the memory card were you trying at one go?

Originally Posted by whiskey212

Had a similar issue and this is the third I have had with this issue. The first froze on the menu screen while loading from a memory card< and before you ask it was on both a MSDuo and various makes/sixes of SD and SDHC cards. It simply displays the round arrow icon in the middle of the screen and the "Loading..." at the bottom, for hours on end, LITERALLY. I went through the hard reset procedure and the device would no longer turn on. The second device was the same but I left it loading for a longer period and after over a day I gave up and took it back to the store. Now this third reader has done the same thing, it's been stuck loading for 4 hours now. IT IS NOT THE BATTERY. I have charged it for well over 6 hours of the last 8 and have yet to read a single page so there is no battery issue. I am about fed up with this piece of garbage and am about ready to return it and abandon eBooks altogether: I never had any problems with ink and paper books. All books on the device/cards are in either the ePub format or PDFs so there is no issue there. My computer will not recognize the reader to do anything from that angle either, so I'm left to conclude this is simply an inferior device as I am clearly not the only one with this device freezing on them. You all may say that it's an easy problem to fix with a reset, but in my case that's simply not true and even if it were it should not have to be reset constantly in order to be used. I believe there is something fundamentally wrong with this device.

[Eliza511]

This seems to me to be a not infrequent problem. It has happened to me about 4 times over the last 3 months since I received the PRS 600.
I eventually decided that a soft reset was the only solution. This is a nusaince as I read several books at once and lost all the pages that I was on.

I enjoy the technology of my laptops and iphone and feel that Sony has really poor software on these readers.

[rmm200]

It sounds to me like the freeze problems listed all related to an external card. Don't blame the device unless you have problems with no external card; just internal memory.

And use a quality brand name external card when you do. I have had very good success with Sandisk; I do know a marginal card can cause no end of problems.

Robert

[kimknapp]

No card in mine.

[poshm]

I've had more freeze/reset issues with the Sony than anything else and no it's not card related as I don't use a card in the device.

The last reset was a particularly nasty one and I thought the Sony had died on me - turns out I had to delete some XML file - so I don't think that is normal behaviour and has to be down to shoddy software.

Thankfully most of the time it works fine.

[poshm]

Whiskey212 are you charging via USB or by a wall plug?

Some problems can be resolved by using a wall plug which normally gives a better and more reliable charge.

The fact you're on your 3rd reader suggests to me there is some kind of problem between your PC and your reader - and the usual culprit is the USB connection.

Can you test it with another PC or USB hub?

[TGNY]

My 300 (no card installed) froze completely while reading Heritage Of Sioux which I downloaded from this forum. Nothing I could do to get it back so I left it the way it was, I couldn't even turn it off!!

I took it out of my bag the next morning and it was off. I turned it back on (battery was still full) and it worked as if nothing happened. I will do the same thing if it happens again!

[Momo_Germany]

All my 3 Sony-Readers (PRS-505, PRS-700 and PRS-700) show this kind of problem very often (nearly every time after having been connected with one of my Computers). Nearly every time after (correct, safe) disconnecting the readers freeze at the staring-up-window.

If they don't freeze, they lose their collections or sometimes even some of the ebooks.

I have 2 cards inserted in each of the readers, storing my ebook-files exclusively on the cards, nothing in internal memory anymore.

Sometimes the readers or one of the cards are shown simply as "Error" in Sony's Library.

The only thing which helped so far was formatting the internal memory of the readers by PC and formatting the cards and then re-copying the collections on the cards.

Every time I wanted to add some ebooks I had to go through this procedure...

I've about 500-600 ebooks (mainly epub-Files) on the cards, sorted into 17 collections.

I alredy changed the cards to other company's cards and/or other sizes - didn't help.

The problem appears on my Desktop-PC, on my Windows-Laptop and on my MacBookPro (both on the Mac-Snow-Leopard part as well as on the WindowsXP-Part installed via Parallels Desktop).

Sometimes my collections even get lost simply while reading; reader restarts without any reason I could understand and if it comes to be used at all again then the collections (and sometimes also some of the ebooks) are gone.

Sometimes it happens when I want to add a bookmark or take a look into the Table of Contents.

I think it has something to do with not good internal memory or not good firmware/software.

I use Sony's Software because I strongly want to have my ebooks in collections and inside the collections I want to have the possibility to decide in which order the books appear (not just alphabetically but the ones I want to read next up).

The bottom-line for me is: there must be something wrong with the firmware (or the hardware?) of the Sony-devices and, however, those readers aren't reliable at all to me. It has been really frustrating.

In the meantime I switched to KindleDX, converting all my epubs to mobi-files and I'm completely fine with this new device (and I will be even much more happy as soon as we get the possibility to create folders on the Kindle for sure). For me it's much better than the Sony-devices, so I don't need to solve the problem with the Sony devices anymore and I'm going to sell at least my PRS-600 and PRS-700.

But however for sure I'd be interested to find out what the reason for the problems are and how to solve them. Some of my friends also use the Sony-devices and face the same problems and would love to solve them.

Greetings,
Momo

[Eliza511]

Originally Posted by rmm200

It sounds to me like the freeze problems listed all related to an external card. Don't blame the device unless you have problems with no external card; just internal memory.

And use a quality brand name external card when you do. I have had very good success with Sandisk; I do know a marginal card can cause no end of problems.

Robert

I am afraid all my problems have related to the internal memory so that is not the answer!

[Eliza511]

With so many problems, what is Sony doing about this? How should all these concerns be expressed to Sony?