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Sony Reader PRS-500The Sony Reader is easy on the eyes but in some ways feels like a first effort. Price: $349
By Rachel Metz 
It’s a great idea: a device that’s thinner than a paperback, able to store dozens of full-length books (as well as photos and music), and is light enough to slip in a bag without feeling the extra weight. Sony has delivered all of these features with its first mobile reading device, the Sony Reader PRS-500. But considering its much-delayed release, we expected a bit more.
First, the good news: The Reader is extremely portable, weighing in at nine ounces with a large, six-inch, black-and-white display. The device’s svelte design is due in part to its use of E Ink technology, which is made up largely of microcapsules containing white and black particles that move in response to electricity. As for storage space, the Reader’s 64MB of internal memory is enough for holding about 80 books. You’ll need to slide a higher-capacity Memory Stick Pro card into the included slot to take advantage of other media functions. The Sony Connect software was pretty simple to install and use. It’s similar to iTunes in that you connect the Reader and can then download books to the program’s library and transfer them to the device. We weren’t that impressed with the selection of books available on Sony’s online bookstore, though it currently boasts over 10,000 titles. The prices seemed to be significantly lower than traditional book prices; we purchased The Devil Wears Prada and Haruki Murakami’s Sputnik Sweetheart for $7.96 each. Books loaded onto the Reader from the Sony Connect eBook Store looked almost as crisp as the real thing. You can view the display in either landscape or portrait mode, and we enjoyed the device’s excellent viewing angles. The E Ink technology means the Reader expends no power while keeping the image on its screen, and Sony boasts the PRS-500 should get you through about 7,500 page views on one charge. We were able to read The Devil Wears Prada without having to hunt for the charger. Unfortunately, the Reader suffers from some major flaws, starting with its preponderance of buttons. You’ll find 14 buttons on the face alone, not including a directional controller and two-in-one page-turning button. Many buttons duplicate others’ features (like page turning, for instance), and many seem unnecessary. After making sense of the layout, users will also notice that the Reader’s screen is not backlit, which means you can’t read in the dark. Still, we found we could read the device’s display in dimly lit rooms without tiring our eyes. Once we figured out the functions of the numerous buttons, we had no problem flipping from fiction to photos to music. The page-turning buttons were comfortable to use over extended periods of time. Photos on the Reader looked like pixelated, grayscale versions of the original images, but MP3s sounded pretty good, and we liked that we could listen while reading. We thought we would like the RSS-reader feature, even though there were only 20 feeds available. However, it took us several tries to successfully sign up for and download the feeds. Feeds come complete with images (and ads) as well as the full text of comments from sites that allow them. This bloated the daily feeds to several hundred pages each, and they could not be customized. A late-October feed from Slate magazine, for example, was 321 pages in the smallest available font size. Other functions we would have liked to see on the Reader include the ability to search books and to make notes. We’ve become so accustomed to searching online text that we hoped we could do so here as well, and we’re not quite ready to give up the manual highlighting and note-scrawling that enhances paper reading. On-the-go bibliophiles may find the Sony Reader PRS-500 much more convenient than lugging a stack of books on every trip, but we’ll wait for Version 2.0 before chucking our dead-tree library. Sony Reader PRS-500 Specifications
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