Find eBook Readers Blog   Reading in the Digital Age

I’ve had my Sony Touch PRS-650 for about a week now, and although the buying experience was not very pleasant, the ereader itself is quite nice.  I pre-ordered the PRS-650 before Sony started shipping it but the Sony Style site lost my order.  It took three headache-inducing calls to Sony Customer Service and shipping upgrades to get it here — and it did not ship or arrive when CS promised it would.

As I say, Sony’s new ereader itself is quite nice.  It is attractive and seems solidly built.  Rather than plastic, Sony uses an aluminum body with a rubberized back panel.  My unit also arrived with the batteries fully charged, which is always appreciated.

The only accessory you will find in the box with the Touch is a USB cable.  This is how you charge your new ereader unless you spend another $30 to buy the optional AC adaptor from Sony.  I would rather buy Geomadic’s charging kit which has both an AC adaptor and a car charger for the same price.

The PRS-650 weighs slightly less than the Kindle 3, but as it is smaller (no keyboard), the weight is more concentrated.  In general it feels good and solid in my hands. 

Sony has vastly improved the touchscreen.  The new line of ereaders now use an IR-based touchscreen from Neonode.   There is no glare this time, even in sunshine or other bright light.  The new touchscreen also seems quite responsive.  You can use your fingers or the included stylus. 

In addition to the touchscreen, you also have five buttons along the bottom of the PRS-650: left and right page turning, Home, Size button (change text size, page formatting) and an Options button.

You can turn pages by either using the buttons on the bottom of the ereader or by swiping on the touchscreen.  Taps on the edge of the screen do not work — it has to be a swipe.  If you swipe and hold you can flip through multiple pages.

I had several major complaints about the last gen Sony Touch ereader.  The main problem, of course, was the glare of the touchscreen.  That is gone.  Period.  There is now no glare, and the touchscreen works well.

The second complaint I had with Sony’s previous ereaders was with the somewhat cumbersome navigation.  It seemed like you had to perform too many clicks, button presses and screen taps to get things done.  Sony has improved this aspect of their new ereader to some extent, but they could have done more.

Some things just work better with the touchscreen.  Highlighting is a breeze, and the ability to make freehand drawings and notes is awesome — if you need it.  Getting to a specific page also works very well on the PRS-650 — you just tap on the page numbers in the status bar to get a menu where you can enter a page number, or there is a slider you can use to quickly skim through the ebook.  To create or delete a bookmark you simply double tap the upper right corner of the screen.

To define a word requires but a simple double tap on it.  This is much easier and faster than moving the cursor with the 5-way around the page on the Kindle.  By the way, the dictionary function on the new Sony ereaders is very robust.  There are 12 dictionaries built-in: the Oxford English and American dictionaries plus 10 translation dictionaries.  You can switch between them on the fly while you have the definition of a word open.  If you come across a word in your reading that is in Italian, French, German or Spanish you can easily and quickly get a translation.  The dictionary also keeps a log of the 100 last looked-up words for you to review.

Other functions, such as “Back” are less well handled.  The Kindle 3 integrates a Back button in the keyboard, so this frequently used function is quickly done on the Kindle 3.  On the new Sony Touch, however, you need to first click the Options button and then tap “Go To” and then “Previous View” on the touchscreen.

This may seem a minor thing, but for functions that you use a lot it can become somewhat annoying and frustrating.  I think that one way Sony could have solved this is by putting icons on the status bar at the bottom of the screen that could be tapped to instantly access commonly used functions such as Back, note taking and highlighting, zoom, screen orientation, etc.

Sony has implemented a lot of zooming options.  If you hit the size button you can enlarge a quarter or a sixth of the page to full screen size.  This is in addition to the zoom mode where you have a sliding scale to adjust the magnification level.  The zoom level can now be locked, so you don’t have to redo it with every page turn.  Panning around a magnified page also works much more smoothly now with the faster hardware.

One really cool feature is that if you double tap a picture or other graphic while in zoom mode it will automagically be enlarged to fit the screen.

Sony has also given you the ability to adjust screen contrast and background brightness.  This may help in some cases to make a scanned document more readable.

The Touch ereader has six font sizes for your ereading pleasure, but does not offer different font styles to choose from.  To me the font looks just a tad lighter than the default text on the Kindle 3, but I’m not complaining — it looks good and is very readable.  For that matter, the epaper background on the Sony sometimes seems just slightly whiter than the Kindle 3 to me, although it didn’t come out that way in the picture below.  The Sony is on the left and the Kindle 3 on the right.  The text sizes don’t exactly match on the two ereaders.

Library management on the PRS-650 is good.  You can sort through your ebooks by date added, title, author, file name or latest read.  You can organize your books in collections.  You can create new collections or delete collections you no longer want without deleting the ebooks in them.  You can also delete ebooks from the device, rather than having to connect to your computer to do so.

When it comes to Sony’s ereaders, another major area of complaint for me has always been Sony’s ebook store — it just will not do.  Of the four biggest names in ebook stores — Kindle Store, Barnes & Noble, Kobo and Sony Reader Store — the Sony Reader Store is my least favorite.  There are fewer titles and in many cases (presumably fewer cases after the agency model took affect) the prices are higher.  When announcing the new line of Sony ereaders Sony announced in passing that it would also be working on the Reader Store, so hopefully we may see some improvements.  In any case, you should also be able to buy ebooks from Kobo on the Sony Touch.

Sony, for some reason unfathomable to mere mortals such as myself, elected to only include a wireless connection in the Daily Edition, which has both Wi-Fi and 3G.  The other two new Sony ereaders, the PRS-350 and PRS-650, like their predecessors, do not even have a Wi-Fi connection.

The new line of Sony ereaders is already priced higher than the main competition in the US — the Kindle 3 and NOOK.  Including Wi-Fi would have cost Sony something more per unit to build the ereaders, but I don’t think it would have cost much.  

So if not because of cost issues, then why leave out the Wi-Fi?  The only reason I can come up with is that it is purely a marketing strategy. 

The new Pocket Edition is $179.99, the Touch Edition is $229.99 and the Daily Edition will probably be $299.  Perhaps the boys and girls in the marketing department felt that a 1-inch larger screen size was not enough in itself to drive sales to the Daily Edition, which is Sony’s top-of-the-line model.  Perhaps they felt more was needed to differentiate the Daily Edition and make you want to buy it instead of the Touch or Pocket.

Rather than adding more features to differentiate the Daily Edition, I’m guessing that Sony elected to leave out important features from the lesser models in a misguided effort to make the Daily Edition more desirable and to drive more sales to it.

If you have a different explanation that makes more sense (and hopefully is less cynical), please enlighten me.

I think leaving out a wireless connection was a big goof on Sony’s part.  Now, in order to buy a book you have to install the sometimes clunky desktop software and authorize your ereader.  Then you have to buy the ebook, download it to your computer and then transfer it to your ereader.

OK, that’s not so bad, but the thing is, if you have a wireless connection it is so easy to just click on a book and buy it.  If you are on your computer and have a Kindle, you can have the ebook sent to your Kindle with one click.  Or you can buy directly from your ereader.  This leads to a lot of ebooks sold as impulse buys.  Sony is missing out on selling a lot of content by eliminating impulse buying from their equation.

It seems to me that Sony thinks this business is still about selling razors, while everyone else is busy selling razor blades.

Sony PRS-650 Touch vs Kindle 3 vs NOOK; My Take

First of all, I think Sony deserves lots of kudos for listening to their customers’ complaints and releasing a new set of ereaders that fix some of the problems of and are a major improvement over the last generation.

So did Sony hit a home run?  Well, no.  And that is frustrating because I think that they came pretty close.  If, for example, Sony had seen fit to include a Wi-Fi connection and price the Touch at the same level as the Kindle 3 & NOOK Wi-Fi + 3G models then they might well have come close to hitting one out of the park.

It also has to be said, however, that no matter how good the Sony Touch hardware is, the Sony ebook store is not even in the same league as the Kindle Store.  An ebook reader is, after all, only as good as the ebooks that are available for it.

Before I compare the PRS-650 to the Kindle 3 and Nook let’s list a few of the more obvious pros and cons:

Sony Touch pros and cons

Pros

• Attractive and seems solidly built.
• Very nice touch screen.
• Well done note taking, annotations and other features.
• Pearl e-ink display plus faster chips.
• Can borrow ebooks from public libraries.

Cons

• No 3G or Wi-Fi.  Books must be downloaded to PC and then transferred to ereader.
• Sony’s ebook store is not the best.
• Expensive.
• Sony Customer Service — this is what Sony overoptimistically calls the department you’ll be dealing with when something blows up.
• No Text-to-Speech (TTS).

First, I’ll get the NOOK ereader out of the way.  Buy the Sony instead.  The Sony Touch is more expensive, yes, but it also offers much better construction and is fully functional.  The Touch also has a better e-ink display and is faster.    

Of course Sony PRS-650 Touch vs Barnes & Noble NOOK is not really a fair comparison at the moment because the PRS-650 is newer tech and is made from better and shinier things.  I fully expect B&N to introduce a new version of the NOOK ereader in the coming weeks and Sony may find this a harder comparison after that happens.

When it comes to Sony Touch vs Kindle 3 there is more to consider.  First is price.  The Touch costs $229 vs the Kindle 3’s price tag of $139 for Wi-Fi or $189 for Wi-Fi plus 3G.  Then there is the Kindle Store, which is the best because it has way more titles and prices are usually lower when not set by publishers.  Amazon’s customer service will also be better to deal with than Sony’s if something goes wrong.  

Both the Kindle 3 and the Sony PRS-650 ereaders use the Pearl e-ink display and faster hardware than the last generation, and in these respects are pretty equal.   So, other than the above, it comes down to which feature is more important to you — wireless or a touchscreen.

Personally, I prefer the Kindle and the Kindle Store.  But I do like the Sony PRS-650 and will be keeping mine, though I suspect that I will be using my Touch mostly for library ebooks and non-DRMed ePubs.  For paid ebooks I will most likely be using my Kindle ereaders. 

Possibly Related Posts:

• Kobo Touch Edition eReader Review
• Borders store closing sale
• Motorola Xoom Honeycomb Tablet – unboxing and review
• Nook Color unboxing and initial impressions
• Kindle Touch – Review