Sony ereader touch edition

The ability to scrawl notes on your books is great, but the additional free-form doodling app is there for a bit of fun. Another support act feature of the PRS is its music-playing abilities. The size and slow navigation of the device make it a poor replacement for a dedicated MP3 player though — even budget phones are more capable in this area.

Playing music will also quickly eat into the claimed 2-week battery life — actual battery performance in real-world conditions is completely dependent on use number of page turns , especially as there are no 3G or Wi-Fi connectivity options here to suck up juice. The PRS is a king among ereaders, but it also comes with a royal price tag.

If you can stomach the extra expenditure though, its screen is top-notch, not dulled at all by the addition of touchscreen tech. Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.

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Today, we have 9 million users a month around the world, and assess more than 1, products a year. In this article… 1. Verdict 2. Pros and Cons 3. Key Specifications 4.

Trusted Score Share:. Pros Good touchscreen Great E-ink display Dictionary integration. Trusted Score. Great review. Thank you. I read a lot of articles culled from internet sites and rather than hand write out the quotes, I would like to highlight them, and transfer them to my PC.

Kindle 2 does this wonderfully once you have the quotes highlighted. Richard — Thanks. If you read comments 18 and 75, you can learn more about transferring notes.

It just says that the maximum for both is 16gb. Thanks, Sara. Sara I think you can have both at the same time, but I think you will probably find that everything slows way down with the memory cards. I never use a memory card in my , but I did try one in my reader when I first got it. I found that everything was slower, and I found that my battery drained faster. One of the books I purchased is next to impossible to read: there are numerous missing spaces between words, and all of the apostrophes are missing.

After making numerous contacts with customer support over the past two weeks, I have not been able to resolve the problem. To add insult to injury, not only will they not fix the book so it can be read, but they will also not refund my money for the book I can not read.

What a waste of money! I am not going to buy any more books. I recently went to USA, and althought the Nook its kind of better for the price, for us international users, the sony one is more convinient. I tested the out today in a store next to the Truly the has the best features, but as another commenter said, its just too slow for practical notemaking, plus the is MUCH nicer than the IMHO in terms of clarity.

The text is VERY crisp on the , where-as the understandably being a touch screen just seems like reading a book through a pane of glass. The instructions say to press the plus sign button — but where do I find this?

Please can you help? Emma, I added an update to the end of the review. LOL, perhaps a proud sony engineer making a covert defense of his work. The Sony PRS looks nice. Still I think that e-readers are still overpriced, considering their technological complexity. I believe that when the Asus and the other companies get the momentum that the prices will go down, while the features will go up.

I have a but when I tried to use memory cards they would not work on PRS I had to put them onto my computer. Are the cards special or should ordinary SD cards work. What am I doing wrong. How can i change this information of Title and Author on pdf files?

I tried going into pdf file properties, but that doesnt allow to change. Thanks Rafiq. Rafiq Thanks, Rafiq! As I understand, pdf files are designed to make editing them very difficult. Apparently, they do have metadata that can be edited if you find the correct tools. You could Google to find a pdf editor to see if you can fix the file attributes.

Marie Regular SD cards work with Sony readers. Hi Janet, How very nice of you to compile this. I got a PRS as a gift and I have not been able to use it. The manual is not user friendly at all.

I see many people have to find a solution on the internet. Kindle I have heard is more user-friendly and now there is ipad with apps that allow you to put office software on it.

Since mine is a gift I want to keep it, but it is a nightmare to use it and the screen is too small. But I am going to give it another try. Hi, do you know if there is a limit on the amount of notes that the prs can handle? The link can be found in my post 6 above in the comments on this page. I hope sony ebook store gets richer real soon!! Was in my laptop case and got defective monitor lines on it, which I think it was because of going through airport security scan lots of info on the net with similar problem.

I am sure I did not drop it or press it any harder that usual, and Sony refused to repair or replace it while still under warranty said my fault. Will never buy a gain, and am going to cross over to ipad. It sounds like you had a defective battery in the first one. I can read for hours every day over a 2-week period without needing to recharge my battery.

I never completely power-down my reader — just leave it in stand-by. My family has owned 9 different Sony readers over the past 3. I hope this one works better for you. In the past 2 weeks I purchased a silver and a black After giving up the silver to my Mom I went and got a black one for myself. Unfortunately, my new black suffers from moderate sun fade. When flipping pages under direct sunlight the rendered text is VERY faint, thin and washed out.

Not totally gone but a ghost of normal. Anyone else have this problem? It looks like it happens often. Did you have any problems with yours or anyone you know? And thanks for the great detailled review! All of the readers have performed flawlessly, and all of them are still being used by us or by people we passed them on to.

My husband gave me a red for as a gift and I passed along my silver one to an extended family member. Of course, it could the the ones with problems are the noisiest. I live in the southern US. I tend to stay inside with the air conditioning when I read. Your review is the most thorough one out there on the The forum posts are also extemely informative. Really great review. It convinced me to buy PRS red — really nice. I read it once or twice inside, with direct sunlight from the left about 6PM and it was marvelous.

Even better than with the interior light. Thanks for this nice review and other tips. Oh, yes, mobilread is a fantastic site. Thanks for this one, too. To the above commenter I had a PRS and it used to fade if the page was turned in the sunlight.

I used to hold it up to my body or shut the vinyl cover when reading in the sunlight. As to my post I just received a PRS Quite a good deal through I do miss my And congrats on your new ! Update on my exchange. I decided to exchange where I purchased Crutchfield for another new one. The new one does fade a bit if page turns are done under direct sunlight but it is less noticeable than on the original one I had.

I had the opportunity to test them side by side for a day or two until I sent the original one back. Thanks God for this site..! I have tried and tried to make the dictionary work and have not been lucky. Why is that that I tap on the word and nothing pops out? You can go into the options for the reader and see if you have one installed.

Thank you very much for the help. It still did not work so I took it back to Borders. They tried to make it work and they compared it to the one on display. They all agreed there was something wrong with mine and they exchanged it for me.

I have just plugged the new one to be charged. Hope it works this time. Again, thank you very much for all the help. Janet- Quick question, which may have been answered above.

I just copy the epub file into the correct directory, then I import it into the Sony library software with the import option found in the file menu. So I have been researching readers for a few weeks now. I found your review the most informative and helpful out of all the others I have read. Thank You so much for helping people who are sometimes a bit clueless when it comes to these products.

Hi Janet, Great review, very detailed, enough to make me lean towards the for my first reader! The dictionary and hand-written notes functions make it seem more attractive than the , despite the increased glare!

John Thank you for the compliment. I have both — in red. Will the Sony e book store sell their books to a resident of Puerto Rico? The bookstore info says they sell only to the US and Canada. If anyone else is having the same problem as Rafiq book titles being incorrect in your ereader book list you can download a free program called Quick PDF Tools just google and you can change the properties of pdf files. Super simple, you just have to right click on the book file name in windows explorer and put your cursor over Quck PDF Tools.

A menu will pop up and you click on document properties. There you can type in the title of the book and author. So I actually just came home from work to find my ereader here already yay!!! I went ahead and purchased a case and the ac adapter as well. The color is silver and I cant wait to charge it up and get started! So I followed the instructions to set up my ereader. There are lines all over the screen which makes it unreadable and I am not quite sure what to do about this problem i think it said it was going to calibrate the ereader then it went black with a line on the bottom that i believe reads no battery.

I cannot get the device to turn off or charge or anything I am wondering if this is normal or if it is defective. It sounds like it may have been damaged during shipping or something.

It should certainly be under warranty. So despite the fact that I have to send my e reader back because it is defective, I must say that sony e reader support were awesome. I will keep you posted. I am considering buying this or the Daily Edition reader. One concern is stopping me. Is there any way to print or email annotated PDF documents from the reader or the library software?

Annotating and sending technical papers is big part of what I do. I am using sony e-book reader since june , this time while i was searching it became hang. I want to use it as soon as possible. I also would like to know can i press reset to get rid of hang. It is a PDF file that you can view on your computer. Go to page for instructions on resetting your Sony.

You cannot print or email from the reader itself. You can synchronize the notes in your reader copy with the file on your computer. I am sure that you cannot print or email from the reader, however. I hear people saying they only sell to US and Canada. Axler Publishers impose geographical limits on bookseller — paper or ebooks — to define what regions they are allowed to sell.

For example, I believe Waterstones sell in the UK. Check out MobileRead for more booksellers; there are members for all around the globe. So I received my new reader today and the first thing I did was charge it fully. Let me tell you the difference was immediately noticable!!! No more lines lol. I do like the clarity so now I am going to be working on starting a library of books.

It also was surprisingly easy to use. The help option on the reader library is a life saver. Thank you for all your help. Rae Rae Yay! I hope you love it. I love ebooks so much that I never buy paper books anymore. There might be some problem with some files on this device.

I have to wait for 5 or 10 minutes to get a response. Any suggestions? Also, have you tried resetting? The reset button is on the bottom of the reader. The manual instructions are:. Removing the tip from the supplied stylus: Twist the tip until it detached from the supplied stylus.

Be sure to attach again after using it. Wendy I usually get the boxes come up that say scan then the seperate one that has the options of what to do with the device such as auto play. I usually just close these boxes out as it is your computer recognizing you have attachted a device and what to do with it.

After I close those out I open up my Library and its usually fine. I never hit any of the options in the pop up boxes. I think you should go work for C-net or somebody doing the reviews. With all this new info it had pushed me off the fence to go and order the I will keep you up to date on how it goes.

Thank you so much for putting things into a real world format that everyone can understand and use. What color did you get? You know the red ones are best, right?

Because they are so very pretty! Oh, and I already write for the best review site on the internet! But thanks for the compliment to my writing style. Thank you for your detailed review!

My only complaint would be that there is a certain amount of sluggishness when you work with highlighting and editing text highlights and switch back and forth between highlighting and erasing highlights which is frequently necessary as the highlight function is sometimes a bit hyper-sensitive, especially when you sit in a moving vehicle while you do your mark-ups.

Nevertheless, the flexibility of the file formats, the ability to easily read while outside and even the battery life all make the purchase of this eReader worth its cost.

I recently decided to start using an SD card so that I could just have my e-library available without constantly having to add and remove books. What a letdown!! I copied approx. I finally accidentally came to the realization that the SD card was working just fine and it was only taking the PRS a long time to read and index the books on the card.

After about 2 hours, it finally completed its process and I was able to start reading. Like other readers of your review, I have since found out that every single time after the PRS is charged using the USB cable or the card is removed and re-inserted , it takes a minimum of 30 minutes to start up as long as the SD card is inserted.

Without the SD card, it starts up immediately. Of course, I have to reinsert the card to access the books on it, and then I have to wait at least half an hour again, before I can do anything with it. Even though I only had a couple of books on it, I found that having the SD card constantly in the reader caused the battery to drain faster.

I never use SD cards in my readers any more. Tim What type of reader do you have? A , , ? I know with the , holding the button down a little longer made it advance multiple pages. One quick push advances one page. Could it be that you are just holding the page turn button down a little longer than necessary for a single page turn? Is this normal? I did that to make especially sure that the Sony software could access the reader.

Things seemed normal, so I ejected the reader and disconnected it from USB. It was then able to complete the sync in less time. I have had it syncing now for 5 hours so I did the reset option. How long does it normally take to sync? Thanks for your help. Did the reset clear it up, or did it just start the never-ending sync after resetting.

Did you try hooking it back up to the Sony software after you reset it? I did hook it up again to the Reader Library software without luck. Annette, another thing to try is to hook it up to the Sony software and delete all the books you just added from the reader. Also, do you have an SD card in the reader?

You could check over at MobileRead to see if anyone in the Sony forum has any ideas. Is your device charged? Do you have an AC adapter for it?

If you need to get to this point of getting test software, highly advise posting in the MobileReader. I only can delete the whole book, but not just one note. Does anyone knows how? JJB Books on the expansion cards have to be indexed every time you turn the reader on. This is a slow process, and it uses a lot of battery power.

It is not a problem with the reader that can be resolved by Sony support. I think those card slots were intended as a way to add some songs to the reader, not as a way to carry a few thousand books. But if you want to do it, you should try separating your collection onto a set of small SD cards. The battery on mine started to malfunction after about two months.

Worse : If you do a complete shut down 6 seconds on the switch the reloading, if you have a lot of books, will drain the battery. I think Sony should give some of their news products to real users and listen to their advices before launching the product onto the market. Patricia and JJB I discussed the battery life and the misleading use of the number of page turns to discuss battery life in the review.

You will not get page turns from a battery charge in real life. You should be able to get a couple of weeks between chargings. Has anyone experienced very poor battery life from the ? Tose I think it should read any PDF file from anywhere. Depending on how complex the pages are, some may be easier to read than others, though.

I have made a few collections, but now I have trouble with putting books in it. I have empty collections now. Hey Janet, I am really glad to find this review, it helped me a lot to make the general impression. What I would like to ask you is whether it is usable for something outside the books? I am a student and I need this reader to help me study without having to sit near PC I actualy can not force myself to study at PC - that is can it load jpg, powerpoint, docx, exel files and is it comfortable to carry it arround or purchase some sort of a holder for it?

It cannot do Powerpoint and Excel files. The complete list of compatible files is found under the Hardware Specifications header in the review. The PRS is a discontinued model. It was replaced by the PRS, which also seems to be very difficult to find now.

The PRS also cannot read all the files you listed. The PRS is very small and easy to fit in any bag, even some of my purses.

Because it was discontinued so long ago, it might be difficult to find cases for it now. Hi Janet, I am so glad I stumbled on this articule, even though you wrote it 2 years ago. You have helped me so much with your article, the photos and making the user manual available. Are you able to help me with one problem: I have obtained a few out of copyright books online, loaded them to my PC, converted to EPUB and loaded to the ereader. I would appreciate any advice. Having owned a PRS for over 18 months now, I find it a mix of frustration and satisfaction.

For the most part, I can use it to do its advertised job — Read ebooks. Only found out about that issue when I opened the box and found a Sony yellow errata sheet giving a spin about it.

Thanks, Sony. It just locks up, then suddenly, zippo, it will flick two pages in succession , the reflective screen which you noted and, for me, the death of the SD card interface in the Reader suddenly, after about 14 months.

It just died. You first have to highlight the section, then tap on it to pull up a separate menu that asks whether you want to add a note using the keyboard or handwriting it via the "drawing" method. Unfortunately, we found that when you tap on the highlighted section, it didn't always pull up the note-taking menu. It was a bit frustrating at times. After annotating a book on the Reader, you can "merge" those annotations with annotations you may have already added to the same book using your computer from within the eLibrary software.

Viewing--and reviewing--text, notes, and any markups using a larger computer monitor is preferable to viewing them on a dull, 6-inch screen, so if you're a big annotator, you'll probably find yourself reading a lot more on your computer than you think. While this all sounds quite sophisticated and potentially useful, we'll warn you that to get the hang of the markup features, you're going to have to do some digging in the user manual it's available as a PDF file. And even then, you may run into some snafus.

As for more mundane items such as battery life, these devices are designed to go several days or even weeks without needing a recharge.

According to Sony, you should get up to 7, page turns or about two weeks of usage from a single charge. However, like the PRS, the included lithium ion battery isn't user replaceable--you have to send the unit back to Sony if the battery dies. It's also worth noting that we couldn't charge the Reader with a standard USB cable connected to a 5V power adapter, such as the standard iPod wall charger.

With the addition of thousands of free public domain titles from Google which includes many pre-WWI classics , Sony boasts more than 1 million titles in its e-book store, and that number continues to grow.

Sony's also upgraded its eBook Library PC software it's up to version 3. While the process of transferring content to the device isn't as convenient as downloading books wirelessly to the unit as you can with the Kindle as long as you can get a signal , Sony's improved its software to the point where it's become fairly easy to use and is not the liability it once was.

Still, there are some small quirks you'll discover that make you think there's room for additional tweaks. Downloading a purchased book is a two-step process. You launch the software, connect the Reader via USB, and browse the e-book store, which in some ways is better organized and superior to the e-book store built into the Kindle. After you purchase a title, it goes into a special folder; you then drag the title onto the icon for the device and it transfers to it.

Overall, it's pretty simple. And adding nonencrypted files isn't hard either. After downloading a file to your computer, you import that file to your library using the "import" function and drag it over to the "Reader" icon on the left side of your screen. In fact, as we've said before, one of the Reader's strengths is its capability to read other formats besides encrypted Sony e-books from the store. The zoom functionality on PDFs is more robust on this model than the PRS, but those who are looking for stronger PDF support should probably check out a larger format e-reader like the 9.

Another big plus is that the PRS and other Sony Readers are compatible with digital books from local libraries, which have just begun lending out e-books using an EPUB file format with day expiration. The selection is currently very limited, but anything that's available, is free to download. There's a lot to like about the Sony Reader Touch Edition. It's slim, relatively lightweight, more compact than the Kindle 2, and it is classy looking. We also continue to be fans of the touch interface for e-readers and its feature set is quite good, despite lacking a wireless option.

All told, it's hard to ignore the fact the PRS is hampered by screen issues. While they may not be complete deal breakers, they're definitely something you should be aware of and we recommend that you check this product out in person before buying it.