500 reviews and New 505 version?

[fishcube]

Are there any good reviews on the Sony ereader 500? I'd love to hear of anyone's experiences with the Sony ereader. Considering buying one. I love reading and love the form factor and having several books with me at one time.

When is the new 505 version coming out? price?

Sharon

[NatCh]

Welcome to MobileRead, fishcube!

For a general once over on the 500 (it's just "Reader" by the by, we don't really know what that thing is, but it's not an "e" ), a good place to start is here and here.

From there, you'll want to have a look at the discussion in this forum.

As for the 505, all we've really got at the moment is rumors, but here are the best of them.

[Greymage]

I got a reader through the credit card offer a couple of weeks ago. As far as the reader itself goes, it's pretty good as a reader, I prefer it to a real book most times - it's nice not to have to prop pages open when you're reading and eating. The display is pretty nice; previously I read on my laptop or Axim, and I prefer the Sony. It's not quite as good as real paper; the contrast isn't as good, so I need brighter light than I would with a book. It's also nice to hold, small enough to carry around to read while waiting for doctor, car, etc., but big enough to have decent amounts of text displayed. When actually reading, page turns happen quickly enough not to be annoying. However, the reader is slow to go back when you hit the menu button, and REALLY REALLY slow when you insert a memory card with a lot of books on it, even one you loaded through the Connect software.

The Connect software on the PC is the worst part of the reader. It is slow and a memory hog. I've only loaded about 700 books and a hundred or so pictures into the library so far, and the virtual memory size shown in the Windows task manager for it is over 1 gig already. I've also somehow managed to corrupt its database once already with a collection, to the point I had to delete its database and start over to get it working properly. I hate to see how slow and big it is if I fill up a 2gb SD card with books; right now I only have about 600mb on the card.

[JSWolf]

Connect is not slow. The PRS500 is using USB 1.1. Plus, as you transfer your data, Connect is setting things up so you go do stuff like open the book, change font sizes, etc. whout having to wait for your slower Reader to process this for you.

[Greymage]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Connect is not slow. The PRS500 is using USB 1.1. Plus, as you transfer your data, Connect is setting things up so you go do stuff like open the book, change font sizes, etc. whout having to wait for your slower Reader to process this for you.

Connect is slow and buggy:

- I load books onto a fast SD card using a usb 2.0 reader, and it takes much more time to transfer books from the library using Connect than the I/O time should take. If it's processing the data as it transfers, then why does it take so long to import books? I can see book processing as an excuse for a slow import or transfer, but not both. And really, books are pretty small, just a few hundred K up to maybe a little over a megabyte. I bet I can encode a 1MB video file with xvid faster than Connect imports a book, and the former takes a lot more processing.

-It takes a huge amount of memory... when I first insert the SD card into the reader on the PC, Connect's VM size goes up to (now) 1.4 GB, for about 800 books. There's something wrong with that.

- The database gets corrupted easy. It crashed once when importing, and now it acts funny when you delete books or try to sort. It actually doesn't sort properly now when you click on the Title or Author headers. I'm probably going to have to delete the library and reimport everything (again, had to do this already because of a corrupted collection).

Compare Connect to Itunes - that handles much bigger files, and much larger amounts of files, much faster, with no funky behavior. I only have a few hundred books so far and Connect is unwieldy, whereas Itunes runs fine with many thousands of songs.

Connect runs fine if you have a few books, but if you try to take advantage of a big SD card and the free ebook sources like Gutenberg you end up suffering.

[Greymage]

Uggh, just happened again... deleted database, started importing, Connect blows up at some point, now won't come up until I delete the database again.

Really, that's just poor programming.

Love my reader, hate Connect....

[yvanleterrible]

Thread highjacked in less than three posts. Must be a record.

The 505, if that name still stands after that accidental unveiling, is totally unknown apart from its looks. I hope its features will be as nice as the Bookeen's!

[NatCh]

Originally Posted by yvanleterrible

Thread highjacked in less than three posts. Must be a record.

Nah, we had one recently that went on the 2nd post!

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Greymage

Connect is slow and buggy:

- I load books onto a fast SD card using a usb 2.0 reader, and it takes much more time to transfer books from the library using Connect than the I/O time should take. If it's processing the data as it transfers, then why does it take so long to import books? I can see book processing as an excuse for a slow import or transfer, but not both. And really, books are pretty small, just a few hundred K up to maybe a little over a megabyte. I bet I can encode a 1MB video file with xvid faster than Connect imports a book, and the former takes a lot more processing.

-It takes a huge amount of memory... when I first insert the SD card into the reader on the PC, Connect's VM size goes up to (now) 1.4 GB, for about 800 books. There's something wrong with that.

- The database gets corrupted easy. It crashed once when importing, and now it acts funny when you delete books or try to sort. It actually doesn't sort properly now when you click on the Title or Author headers. I'm probably going to have to delete the library and reimport everything (again, had to do this already because of a corrupted collection).

Compare Connect to Itunes - that handles much bigger files, and much larger amounts of files, much faster, with no funky behavior. I only have a few hundred books so far and Connect is unwieldy, whereas Itunes runs fine with many thousands of songs.

Connect runs fine if you have a few books, but if you try to take advantage of a big SD card and the free ebook sources like Gutenberg you end up suffering.

I hate to say this, but all you've said is wrong. Connect works. Never a crash, never a slowdown. Never a problem. I'm sorry to say, but I think somehow your computer is buggered.

[Blusaber]

Originally Posted by Greymage

Connect is slow and buggy:

- I load books onto a fast SD card using a usb 2.0 reader, and it takes much more time to transfer books from the library using Connect than the I/O time should take. If it's processing the data as it transfers, then why does it take so long to import books? I can see book processing as an excuse for a slow import or transfer, but not both. And really, books are pretty small, just a few hundred K up to maybe a little over a megabyte. I bet I can encode a 1MB video file with xvid faster than Connect imports a book, and the former takes a lot more processing.

-It takes a huge amount of memory... when I first insert the SD card into the reader on the PC, Connect's VM size goes up to (now) 1.4 GB, for about 800 books. There's something wrong with that.

- The database gets corrupted easy. It crashed once when importing, and now it acts funny when you delete books or try to sort. It actually doesn't sort properly now when you click on the Title or Author headers. I'm probably going to have to delete the library and reimport everything (again, had to do this already because of a corrupted collection).

Compare Connect to Itunes - that handles much bigger files, and much larger amounts of files, much faster, with no funky behavior. I only have a few hundred books so far and Connect is unwieldy, whereas Itunes runs fine with many thousands of songs.

Connect runs fine if you have a few books, but if you try to take advantage of a big SD card and the free ebook sources like Gutenberg you end up suffering.

Time to slow down and start reading some of your 700 books


A Happy reader user

[Leaping Gnome]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I hate to say this, but all you've said is wrong. Connect works. Never a crash, never a slowdown. Never a problem. I'm sorry to say, but I think somehow your computer is buggered.

For YOU. Just like for HIM it is slow and does crash. Hooray for anecdotal evidence!

[mcramer]

.....and hooray for generalisation in general

[andym]

Sharon

Personally I'd wait a two or three months until the Bookeen CyBook is on the market, people have had a chance to put it through its paces (and the developer's have had a chance to fully iron out the bugs). Then make a choice between what's on the market.

The Sony has its disadvantages too - the main one is if you purchase a book in lrf format it will only work on Sony hardware (though there's plenty of free content around from this forum and from feedbooks.com).

The other issue is backlighting. Some people wouldn't do without it some people are happy to do without it if it means they have longer battery life and they can read in the sunlight.

[JSWolf]

You purchase a Mobi format book and it doesn't have the devices PID in it, it won't work on that device. So it can be as unforgiving as LRX.

[andym]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

You purchase a Mobi format book and it doesn't have the devices PID in it, it won't work on that device. So it can be as unforgiving as LRX.

The product isn't on the market yet. I'm sure this is something that will be included when the product comes to market. Which is why my advice was to wait for a couple of months. At that point you can make a sensible comparison.

[Edit] - and my comment was about the comparison betwen the Sony Reader and other handheld devices including PDAs, not just about the Cybook.