The PRS-700 is Sony’s latest in the Portable Reader System variety of gadgets.  You can get the specifications at Sony’s Web Site; I would just like to cover my initial impressions of the device. As far as my background with e-books, I have been purchasing them for the last 7 years or so and have read them on various devices.  Prior to my purchase of the PRS-700, the best experience I have had with reading books via mobile electronics has been on Windws Mobile smart phones running Adobe Reader.

Reading an e-book on a phone takes a steady hand and an abundance of patience.  Just when you think you’re reading like an Evelyn Wood speed reader, you find that you’ve clicked to advance the page 20 times, only to make a quarter of a page’s progress.  I don’t so much mind having to feverishly click the page forward button as I do a mobile reader application that makes me scroll over horizontally on each and every line of the book because it does not wrap at the visible screen margin. This pretty much makes me forfeit the attempt of reading the document or book. The last peeve I have over mobile readers is that nearly all of them use backlight TFT-LCD displays (if you’re lucky you might have something with a beautiful organic LED—OLED).  A TFT display does not do well in conditions where there is a lot of natural light.  To compensate for this, you have crank the backlight up all the way and leave it on just to be able to read the text without an eye strain born migraine.  Most backlights shut off after a certain amount of inactivity, so you have set the device to keep the light on for longer periods.  The backlight, of course, is one of the biggest battery charge buzz-killers. So, assuming that one might only use their mobile device to read with, as opposed to making phone calls etc.., you’d be lucky if the typical device would last an hour of continuous reading.

Now lets contrast the The PRS-700’s features against the typical mobile device with an ebook reader installed. First off, the PRS-700 does not make the user scroll horizontally when the documents don’t fit the visible margin while in the standard reading mode.  The word wrapping algorithm seems a little odd though, as it does newspaper style column wrapping (i.e. putting dashes at random points int the word at the point of the line feed) with using the default font size (small). The PRS-700 doesn’t seem to do image resizing while in standard reading mode.  This means, for PDF documents, that you will get all of the image, figure, or table text stacked up in weird configurations (i.e. 12 letter word getting spread down 4-3 letter wide columns).  In the case of data tables in a PDF document, they become unintelligible.  The, sort of, workarounds for this are to a) set the font size to small and get your reading glasses out so that you can get the microfiche-type version of the page as it looks in the original book, or b) use the zoom feature and go back to scrolling both vertically and horizontally to see the complete page as it did in the original ebook.  The only problem with the zoom mode is that goes out of zoom mode each time you turn a page. I might have offered the user the option to stay in zoom mode while changing pages. Fortunately, if you have to go-a-scrolling, the PRS-700 has a touch screen.

The PRS-700 touch screen isn’t going to be like the TV version of the iPhone, but it performs well enough to get the job done.   Before I go on, let me make this extra clear:  there is very limited use of touch screen dragging  to pan around the document (only in zoom mode).  The other touchscreen features are used mostly to click on screen, rendered buttons that perform various functions.  Highlighting text to make notes and/or bookmarks and using a couple of scrollbars are the only other places I have seen the use of dragging with the PRS-700 touchscreen and included stylus.  At that, text highlighting seemed clumsy to me and prone to not having the desired outcome.  The stylus is slight a misnomer too, as you will not be doing any free form markup to your documents. The stylus is simply a slightly more elegant version of your index finger. You’d have to have a severe fat-finger issue to need the stylus ( I am talking gorilla fingers here).

The most novel innovation that the PRS-700 utilizes is its e-ink Electronic Paper Display (EPD) screen—a truly revolutionary technology.  I will not go into details, but essentially the display flips a pigment to be either white or black. Once the pigment is flipped it utilizes zero energy to stay static. This means once a page is rendered on the reader it stays that way until the device forces it to change.  I am perplexed as to why the PRS-700 clears the page after an hour of inactivity, as this actually takes more energy than just leaving the page up.  The only thing I can figure is that there may be some sort of burn-in affect if the same image stays up for very long periods of time. Another possibility is that the touchscreen takes energy while waiting for something to touch it. The EPD allows the PRS-700 to undergo about 7500 page turns on a single charge (i.e. this does not include using the LED reading light, or using the processor intensive functions like text searches and zooming in and out).

I read a lot at night and find the low power LED reading light very useful. Now, this is not a backlight, because EPDs are more akin to actual paper, than an LCD display.  The reading light actually shines light on the display not through it like on an LCD (you can think of a LCD display like an overhead projector—where you have to shine light through the plastic to see the image on the wall). I have found I get about 4 hours of use on a charge using the LED reading light 100% of the time.  I haven’t killed the battery yet using it without the LED light—so, I’d say it would take days of reading to deplete a full charge if you are just reading (i.e. not using any processor intensive features). The EPD reads great in typical room lighting or with natural light—heck, it looks great reading outside on a bright day!  The screen resolution reminds me of the first black and white, hi-res Apple MacIntosh displays that came out in the ’80s.  The image quality amazed me on the EPD just for the simple fact that it doesn’t take any electricity to stay there, but yet I can change the page to something completely different.  I find that the resolution is great for reading and even detailed, greyscale images look fine.  On a side note—when I was reading my first book, I thought there was dust on my display, but found that there were several “pixels,” if you will; that were always stuck in white mode.  It hasn’t degraded the experience, but it looks like the manufacturing process (and/or quality control)  hasn’t been perfected yet on the EPD. 

The text search feature performs adequately for books that are under 250 pages or so, but I have found that any book larger than that takes far too long for my impatient tastes.  I have also found that searching books in the 500+ range have caused the device to lockup (or at least become unresponsive) in which case I had to reboot it.  The PRS-700 has a photo viewer—which makes perfect sense as this a digital image and text rendering device; however, I am less sold on the music player feature.  The primary reason for having an EPD display is for the low power consumption advantage.  Why then add a power hungry (in relation to the EPD) music player?  I don’t ever use this line but, “why rob Peter to pay Paul?”

Lastly, I am going to just whine a little bit.  Why on earth can’t Adobe and others make an ebook reader application that actually knows which page it’s on?  Invariably the page number on the reader is considerably different than the actual book page.  The PRS-700 has a page search feature, where you enter the page number you want to go to—but it’s never the same page as the Table of Contents or the Index—at least in PDF documents.  The PRS-700 also has a page scan tool in which you scroll horizontally to view different pages.  In the end, it takes more time than I’d like to navigate to specific areas in an ebook.   In my humble opinion, this is where an ebook reader reaches true “book-hood”— when it has all of the ease of use and utility of a paper book (or better, of course). The PRS-700 is the closest I have been to true “book-hood,” but it’s not quite there.

When it’s all said and done, I am glad that I made the plunge and paid the steep price for this piece of technology.  The pros definitely outweigh to cons to me, and that’s all that matters!