Will there be another firmware upgrade?

[NatCh]

I'm not going to venture any guesses as to their motivations or reasonings, but I remember them talking at the Blogger's Day thing about the focus groups they did when they started designing the PRS-500. If memory serves me (it was almost a year ago, and I didn't take notes on this part, so ... ), they took a group of folks and had them sit down and play with some Libriés and started with what they thought of those.

I'm not real familiar with the feature set on the Libriés, but the differences between them might be informative, in that they presumably changed them based, at least partially, on the responses from the focus groups.

[pwalker8]

I would give that theory more credence if we were actually seeing some action out of Sony. One of the more frustrating things to me is that when the eReader first came out, Sony acted like they were going to actively support and promote the eReader. We were being assured that Sony people were reading the boards , we got a couple of posts from Sony peoples and people reported talking to Sony developers at various events. Since that first month, we hear zip from Sony. We have had one small bug fix release in some nine months, with no official word of anything on the horizon. Compare this to the Apple iPhone, which is reportablely going to get it's first update before the week is out. I really have to wonder if Sony actually had/has any developers actively working on the eReader, or if they farmed it out to either a third party or a bunch of contractors. The situation really does have that feel to it.

Originally Posted by dhbailey

I think that perhaps they didn't suspect anything but originally programmed it simply in order to see what sorts of suggestions/complaints/desires came forth from early adopters. ...

[RWood]

The cell phone market is constantly changing and the iPhone is a very complex unit doing almost everything for everybody. The Sony Reader in contrast is a dedicated purpose unit. Rather than lament the lack of updates, rejoice in knowing that they got it so right that massive updating is not needed.

[pwalker8]

I only wish that were true. As I recall, one of the first threads here was suggested enhancements and Connect is so massively wrong that it's inspired a wealth of replacements by several of the very bright developers here.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

I only wish that were true. As I recall, one of the first threads here was suggested enhancements and Connect is so massively wrong that it's inspired a wealth of replacements by several of the very bright developers here.

I must respectfully disagree with you.

The fact that people are suggesting enhancements does not mean that the current Reader does not do its job well. For reading fiction, cover to cover (the task it was designed to do) it does a superb job. One cannot use the fact that people are requesting that it does more as a reliable indicator that it doesn't do a good job now.

One of the most frequent early requests, for example, was that the Reader display pictures in RTF files. Despite that probably being "number 1" on most peoples' "wish lists" back in December, it's never mentioned today. Why? Because now we have a wealth of tools for creating books in the Reader's native "LRF" file format which displays pictures just fine.

As far as "Connect" goes, the reason for the replacements is not particularly that there's anything wrong with Connect, but that people wanted to be able to use the Reader with operating systems other than Windows. Personally I think that Connect is just fine. It's rock solid (for me, at least) and it has an absolutely wonderful Reader "emulator" in it which lets you view Reader books on the PC. I create a lot of Reader books and these days I never bother loading them onto the Reader to see what they'll look like - I just use the emulator in "Connect". Does a great job.

What do you perceive to be "massively wrong" with Connect, may I ask?

[NatCh]

It is kinda unstable for a lot of folks, HarryT. I know you're having remarkable results with it, but it crashes about every 5th time I use it -- which is an improvement by the way. Nothing catastrophic for me, I just restart it and it's fine.

Now when I try to use it to access the ConnStore, the crash rate increases drastically!

[HarryT]

I found the original version of Connect to be flaky but, as I say, for me personally, v1.1 is absolutely rock solid. I know that not everyone has shared my experience.

[NatCh]

The upgrade is, indeed, more stable, but it still gets persnickety with me on a semi-regular basis.

[Xenophon]

Originally Posted by HarryT

What do you perceive to be "massively wrong" with Connect, may I ask?

• It doesn't run anywhere but Windows.
• That's a small loss, because -- on the rare occasions when I have access to a PC that's registered to my Connect account -- I generally find the online store nearly impossible to use.
• The Connect software tries hard to present an 'iTunes-like' interface, but completely misses the richness of sorting, viewing, and file management options. Most notably the ability to find and manage the underlying data files (e.g. the books).

On the plus side, it does talk to the reader. I suppose that it also provides a usable reader emulation for checking out books I'm making... but I've not been doing that when I'm at my sister's place, so I haven't seen that feature in action.

Overall, I guess I'd say that the biggest problems with the connect software are really problems with the connect store. Other than the 'no-where but Windows' thing, of course.

[RobY]

Is there a slight chance that SONY will make the READER to display "double bytes characters" in the near future? There is a big market out there!

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by RobY

Is there a slight chance that SONY will make the READER to display "double bytes characters" in the near future? There is a big market out there!

The operating system will do so already - the only limitation at present are the fonts which actually ship with the Reader. It is possible to re-flash the ROM to install, for example, Chinese fonts. A number of people have done so already.

A slightly easier method is to create LRF or PDF files with the appropriate fonts embedded in the document. Again the Reader will show these just fine.

[astra]

Originally Posted by HarryT

A slightly easier method is to create LRF or PDF files with the appropriate fonts embedded in the document. Again the Reader will show these just fine.

Might be worth to mention that files crteated this way will have a longer refreh page time, rising from 0.5 sec to 2-3 seconds.

[pwalker8]

Oh, I agree that the reader itself works well enough. The organizational tools are rather primitive , but once you have selected a book and are reading it, it works fine, especially with the flash enhancement that lets you assign the turn page function to the joy stick.

As far as the Connect software goes, obviously your mileage varies. I find it to be an amateurish knock-off of iTunes. Yes, the upgrade this spring made it a little less likely to lock up (with the original software, I had to kill the program about 1/3 of the time), but it's still slow as a dog, poorly designed and yes, it still locks up on me from time to time. Since you asked (don't you wish you hadn't?), I will go over some of the issues that I see:

-it goes off into never-never land whenever something unexpected happens, such as the connection to the Connect store drops or it takes too long to transfer to the eReader.

-it becomes non-responsive for long periods of time (something that was preached against way back in 1990, so it's not like it requires any new techniques. Any experienced Mac or Windows programmer knows how to avoid it).

-You have to create collections on the pc, then transfer them to the eReader. Very kludgy.

-Very limited ways of organizing the books, basically you can organize by author, title, date and that's it. No categories, series, or any of the various ways people traditionally organize books. Take a look at iTunes and see how many ways you can organize the songs.

I could go on quite a bit more, but I think you catch my drift here. In general, the connect software comes across to me as something that was slammed together in the space of a week by the office intern. I expect something much more polished in a consumer grade product.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

As far as the Connect software goes, obviously your mileage varies. I find it to be an amateurish knock-off of iTunes. Yes, the upgrade this spring made it a little less likely to lock up (with the original software, I had to kill the program about 1/3 of the time), but it's still slow as a dog, poorly designed and yes, it still locks up on me from time to time. Since you asked (don't you wish you hadn't?), I will go over some of the issues that I see:

No, I asked because I was genuinely interesting in knowing. Thank you for taking the take to express your concerns.

-it goes off into never-never land whenever something unexpected happens, such as the connection to the Connect store drops or it takes too long to transfer to the eReader.

I'm never experienced that but, there again, I never use the Connect Store. Perhaps there are issues related to the Connect Store that I'm therefore unaware of.

-it becomes non-responsive for long periods of time (something that was preached against way back in 1990, so it's not like it requires any new techniques. Any experienced Mac or Windows programmer knows how to avoid it).

Agreed. This can be irksome on occasions. For me, though, it always "recovers" from these little fits, so it's not actually a problem, just a cosmetic issue. I agree though - a simple multithreaded approach with one thread handling the UI and another doing the transfer would have eliminated that.

-You have to create collections on the pc, then transfer them to the eReader. Very kludgy.

I don't use collections, so again this isn't an issue for me.

-Very limited ways of organizing the books, basically you can organize by author, title, date and that's it. No categories, series, or any of the various ways people traditionally organize books. Take a look at iTunes and see how many ways you can organize the songs.

Perhaps the thing is that I don't use Connect to organise my book collection any more than I use iTunes to organise my music/audiobook collection simply because both are far too large. I use my own custom Access databases for cataloging both my music and book collections.

I use Connect for two things:

1. Transferring books to my Reader, and deleting those I have on it. I never have more than a few dozen at a time on the Reader.

2. Using the full-screen "Reader Emulator" while creating all the books I've uploaded to the "Book Uploads" forum here. This emulator is absolutely wonderful and, for me, far, far outweighs any minor niggles that "Connect" might have. It's a perfect emulation of the Reader and an absolute "life saver" for anyone creating their own Reader content.

I could go on quite a bit more, but I think you catch my drift here. In general, the connect software comes across to me as something that was slammed together in the space of a week by the office intern. I expect something much more polished in a consumer grade product.

As I say, because of the wonderful emulator I can forgive Connect almost anything. I defy anyone to write that in a week, no matter how fantastic a programmer they may be. The rest, for me, are trivial niggles. Obviously for you, they are more important - we all have our own views of these things.

Thanks again for sharing your views - I am very interested to hear them and appreciate you taking the time to do so.

[pwalker8]

I guess it comes down to how you are using it. I rarely, if ever, use the emulator, so it really doesn't matter to me. Obviously, you do use it. I use iTunes to keep my music collection organized, and wish I could use Connect the same way. I suspect another issue that I have that you don't is that I have some 70 books that I have bought at the Connect store and since the connect store give each book a name that has nothing to do with the book title, and since the file is encrypted, meaning, I can't read it via normal means, Connect is the only way to know what file contains what book.