Books are awesome. They are a great source of information as well as an excellent way to spend leisure time. You might ask, what is the future of books? What if we run out of paper, what would the future books look like? Perhaps there is already an answer to that question in the form of e-book readers. These devices may be initial templates for the book of the future, because it has a lot of futuristic features, including the ability to store thousands of books in a single, lightweight device. In this article, we will discuss the Sony Reader Touch Edition PRS-600, and compare it to previous Sony readers and other e-book reader brands.
FEATURES
The Sony Reader PRS-600 also known as the Touch Edition of the Sony Reader comes next to Sony’s previous reader, the PRS-700. Compared to a typical paperback book, it is about the same height and slightly wider. Like a typical paperback book, the PRS-600 is very easy to hold. It feels very durable and solid, and it is even comfortable to hold in a landscape orientation, an orientation in which the device is held sideways.
The curved edge of the Sony Reader Touch Edition PRS-600 makes it look smaller than the PRS-700, but they are of the same size. It has slick black, red and silver colors, and a really neat clean and modest style. It has a 440 MB usable built-in memory and has dual expansion slots for additional memory cards. It also has a 6 inch screen diagonal which supports very good quality resolution and 8 levels of gray scale for your book page. Furthermore, this device is a very responsive touch screen. If you want to go to the next page of a book, you can swipe your thumb to the right and it will go there. If you don’t want to swipe, you can always use the buttons for page forward or back at the bottom.
On screen
Turning on the device for the first time and reading your first book is very easy to do, thanks to the very intuitive menu. The menu options are very easy to understand! Aside from that, they are adequately big, with big fonts placed in big rectangular spaces, so its hard to miss it with your fingers. Also, the first time you read a book might surprise you. You’ll be amazed at how paper-like the book page is, thanks to e-Ink technology. This technology has many advantages; it conserves energy, it doesn’t strain your eyes, and you get hooked with reading like a book would do to you.
While reading with the PRS-600, you can annotate and write down notes on an e-book page. You can use your hand or a stylus to emulate underlining a phrase in a regular book. You can then put this on to a separate folder which contains all your notes. The stylus is also useful if you want to use the drawing program of PRS-600. It has a neat drawing program which allows you to draw scribbles on a blank page and save them for later viewing. This stylus is inserted at the top right portion of the device so you will always have a place to keep it.
Built-in dictionary
With the stylus or your finger, you can also easily look up the meaning of the word with a built-in dictionary. In Kindle e-book readers, you need to navigate the screen cursor to the word you want to look-up. But with the touch screen of Sony PRS-600, just tap on a word with your finger or with a stylus, and the meaning of the word will instantly appear at the bottom. This really allows you to read wherever you are with ease and a good sense of comprehension. In this aspect, the Sony PRS-600 is superior to the also popular Kindle DX and Kindle 2.
Text contrast and anti-glare
The PRS-600 is also superior to its predecessor, the PRS-700, in terms of text contrast and screen glare. The PRS-700 has a side-lighting which was an option for readers who want to read in the dark. But this was taken away for the PRS-600, and for good reason. The side-lighting required an extra glass which reduced the contrast between the words and the background, making it hard to read. The extra glass also increased the glare of the screen when hit by a direct source of light.
Other features
The PRS-600 may have taken away the side-lighting, but it also added some really neat features. First is its ability to support jpeg image viewing and mp3 audio playing. This means you can add more files to your e-book reader. You can add all of these files, including word or pdf files by just dragging and dropping them to your device from your computer. With all these cool features at hand, you may feel that this device is vulnerable. But you can play it safe because the PRS-600 comes with a pouch which protects it from external damage. The leather binder, which came with the PRS-700 before, is now sold separately, but many users are content with this pouch.
SOME DRAWBACKS
Despite all these innovations from the previous Sony reader and other e-book reader brands, the Sony PRS-600 is not perfect. For example, despite the absence of a side-lighting, the glare is still there, especially when there is a direct light source hitting it. Just tilt the screen until you find the right angle to remove the glare. In addition. previous versions of the Sony ebook reader such as the PRS-300 and the PRS-505 have a much better text and background contrast. The font color is blacker, and there is absolutely no glare. Book management within the PRS-600 is also a concern. To manage you need to do it in the eBook library program outside the device.
There are minor issues as well, such as button location and external surface. Button location can be awkward in landscape mode, and the finish at the front and back of this device can be a little bit smudgy, leaving thumbprints as you hold it up.
CONCLUSION
The PRS-600 is relatively expensive, and most of the money goes to the ease of use and the functionality of this device. It turns out that its worth the price. This is definitely the future of reading books, and even magazines and newspapers.
