Chic iPad

By 

G. Farnsworth (Pennsylvania) –

  

This reader has seriously changed my life. I have read so many books since getting it. I bought my wife the pink one and she loved it so much that I had to get a silver one for myself. We are both nuts for them. Amazing purchase.

People pretty much know what an e-reader does. It reads books. I’ll direct my comments to why this was the best e-reader for me and my wife.

============== The Good =================

1. It’s small enough to fit in my shirt pocket. There is no wasted space to speak of around the edge of the screen. If you look at other e-readers there are large keyboards and other miscellaneous wasted space. That makes it a pain to take around. This is small enough to fit in a shirt or coat pocket very easily or be held in the hand, but still sports the five inch screen (which is one inch smaller on the diagonal than the Kindle, for example).

2. Touchscreen. The reason this doesn’t have to have any nasty buttons is that it has a touch screen that works very well. You tap a word twice with your finger to bring up the definition. You brush your finger across the screen to silently turn the page. Brush across and hold to scroll quickly through the book. I wouldn’t have thought the touchscreen was an important feature but it turns out to be extremely valuable. By the way, the touch screen isn’t a second layer of plastic or something as other touchscreen devices tend to be. It uses some kind of infrared sensor. Anyway it works well. You can draw pictures and take notes with a stylus if you want to. Double tap at the top right of the page to “dog ear” the page, leaving a bookmark there.

3. The screen is very clear and looks great. It’s that pearl display. The new kindle also has that. Faster and better contrast than early models. The resolution is amazing. It looks like it was printed on a laser printer.

4. This can read epubs. In case you don’t know, epub is the standard format for ebooks. It’s the format you get free (public domain) books in and it’s the format your library will check a book out to you in. The kindle won’t read epubs and that’s the main reason I started looking at these. It’s amazing how many epubs are out there and they are pretty easy to make myself out of whatever document I may want to open.

I don’t have any big bones to pick…I’m a very happy customer…but here are the things that are suboptimal or you may not like:

=============== The Less Good ========================

1. There’s no wifi. You have to use a computer to put books on. I actually don’t find this annoying. How often do you put books on? And each book is only a half a meg and this has 2 gigs of space. So that’s 4000 books. How often do you need to connect. Anyway it doesn’t bother me, but some people want the wifi. Actually this machine is awesome because if you just plug it in it acts like a usb drive and you just copy stuff over. No need to use the sony software. Freedom!

2. The silver one is too shiny. The borders around the screen reflect more light than the screen does. If there is a light behind me I find this annoying. It’s not a problem with the pink version. I wish they had black. I eventually ended up covering my borders with clean-release tape to stop the glare.

3. The home screen displays the last book you read and the three books you most recently copied on to the drive, not the three you most recently read. This cannot be changed. It seems like a small thing but it gets really annoying when you alternate between two books and neither of them was among the last three copied onto the device. You have to dig into your collection and find the book if it wasn’t the last one you read.

4. Battery life is 2 weeks or so. That’s pretty good, but not as good as the kindle. And the battery is not easily replaceable (same as kindle). We have yet to see how long the battery lasts. At this rate, probably a really long time.

5. This machine is no good for pdf’s. I don’t think any e-readers are except maybe the kindle dx. You can read them but you have to zoom in to see anything and the zoom facility isn’t real convenient. Also, I’ve had the device lock up while reading several pdf’s. Rebooting is easy but I hate buggy things like that. My advice is not to mess with pdfs.

=========== Closing Comments =============

Sonly makes this model, a 6-inch model, and a long-narrow model. I am an academic and would REALLY like a good e-reader for reading academic pdfs. I really wish some manufacturer would make a simple e-reader that will read epubs (unlike the kindle) and has a big enough screen to read a normal pdf page (unlike everything but the kindle dx). I guess I’ll have to wait for that.

In the mean time, this device is perfect for reading novels for…

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