The Sony PRS-505 e book reader visually has a much more elegant air about it than its rivals, especially Amazon’s Kindle which can look a little bulky.
The protective cover is a rather nice tan leather affair and the Reader itself has a sleek metallic look that seems to say “I cost a lot of money, aren’t you impressed?” It weighs in at about nine ounces making it nicely portable.
The Sony PRS-505 uses a standard USB 2.0 connector foe both charging the unit and data transfer. It accepts a number of formats including RTF, PDF, plain text and Sony’s own ebooks. It can also playback MP3 files, letting you add a little music to your reading time. It is not very functional though and as a music player the PRS-505 makes a great ebook reader.
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The reader does not have a speaker, but it does have a headphone jack and two different memory card ports. It also has 200MB of built in storage space which will pop up as a manageable external device in Windows, a nice extra.
Even if the Sony PRS-505 is no good as a music player it is a very impressive example of what is it supposed to do, make reading an ebook as pleasurable as reading a paperback.
The electronic paper technology that the PRS-505 uses was designed to closely mimic the appearance of conventional ink on ordinary paper. A conventional flat panel display uses a backlight to illuminate pixels but the electronic paper is designed to reflect light just as it would be on regular paper. The images and text can be easily viewed from even the strangest of angles and the image is held without drawing power from the device itself.
Power consumption for the Sony PRS-505 is measured by page turns, as that is the only thing that it does need power for. The battery included with the device can, according to Sony, handle up to 7,500 page turns on a single charge. Because there is no backlight you will need to read on the Sony PRS-505 in a well illuminated area, just as you would with a normal book.
Actually reading text on the PRS-505 is a fairly enjoyable experience. The background is not white, as one might expect, but rather a lighter shade of grey, almost as if you are reading a book made from recycled newspaper. There is a choice of four fonts and you can choose the font size that you are most comfortable with as well. There is a both a pagemarking feature and a continue reading function that allows you to stop reading and pick it up again easily later, without losing your place.
US $12.75
The Sony PRS-505 is not without its problems though. The screen flash and delay that was so annoying in this device’s predecessor is much improved but not altogether gone.
When the PRS-505’s screen needs to refresh the display flashes black and then there is a brief crazy dance as the pixels invert. The unfortunate result is that often there is a remaining ghost of the last page for a minute or so which can be extremely frustrating.
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