Ever wonder what’s the big deal with e-book readers? Over the last few years, e-book readers have become a fast-growing industry that has sent many manufactures on the race for e-book superiority. The most notable of the e-book readers would be the Amazon Kindle, with the Sony Reader as a close second. Having recently gotten a chance to get my hands on the latter, I thought I would give my impressions of the device.
At first glance, the Sony Reader seems to be a really slick device. The one I played around with had a red metal exterior, which lead me to believe it was very well built and durable. It wasn’t heavy, but certainly sturdy… very nice!
This was my first chance to view the E-Ink technology up close and personal. After seconds of thumbing through pages on this device, you can easily tell why this type of device is becoming so popular. This technology is so, so much easier on the eyes than any other electronic device I have ever read from. When they say “E-Ink”, they mean it. The display is so close to real paper, its scary. If you still have a problem reading a page, text size can be changed at the click of a button. Nice.
When you first get a glance at the menu system on the Reader, you want to touch it like an iPhone (thank you Apple for spoiling us), but you’ll soon notice the menu system is driven by a series of buttons located to the right of the screen. (it also comes in a touch screen version, but it’s not nearly as slick, and $100 bucks more).
The customer service associate that was touting the Reader’s features to me noted that, “Yeah, you can put anything on our device, unlike the Kindle.” So supposedly, the device accepts PDF and other book formats, whatever they may be.
The huge downfall to these readers are… you guessed it, the price. With a suggested retail price of $299.99, I don’t see this device going out to the masses. I mean… other than the hardcore readers, would anyone really put down that much on this device? Considering all the other cool electronics that can be bought for about the same price point, the price will really has to come down before this is widely adopted. Good thing is, if your read a lot of books, and I do mean A WHOLE LOT OF BOOKS, it eventually pays for itself (estimates are two years).
These are just a few first impressions of this device. Hopefully in the future, I can have a little more personal time with the device, once the prices aren’t so outrageous.
