Portable eBook Readers

The Sony PRS 700 is no longer available from the Sony Style shop but you can still buy it at Amazon, eBay and a few other online stores.

The Sony PRS 700 ebook reader was released in October 2008 and because of the way technology seams to advance at an alarming rate, it was replaced a year later by the PRS 600 (Reader Touch Edition). It maintained roughly the same size as the PRS 505 with a 6 inch diagonal 8 level grey scale e-ink screen but incorporated a touchscreen.

Improvements of the PRS-700 Versus the PRS-505

I mentioned the touchscreen but there is differing opinions whether this is an improvement or not. Obviously touchscreens have to have a special coating on the screen and this seams to cause a bit of glare or fogging of the letters. Some user reviews state that they can’t live with the glare and others that it isn’t an issue for them. I have found that the people that owned a PRS 505 previously are the ones that find the glare too distracting while those that bought a touchscreen as their first ebook reader didn’t notice the glare as much.

Other improvements include the ability to add notes with the virtual keyboard, page turning can be accomplished by touch screen gestures as well as the page turn buttons (although the buttons are now in the middle and harder to reach,) built-in LED lighting to enable reading in poor lighting conditions, improved screen controller which allows faster page turns, menus, and zoom, the ability to highlight text with the stylus pen, search for text in your ebooks, and internal memory increased from 256 to 512 MB.

Thousands of eBooks

Unlike the Kindle, the Sony Reader PRS 700BC makes it easier to add ebooks from multiple sources. You can search, browse, and then buy new releases, bestsellers, classics, and other popular ebook titles from the Reader Store. You can also go to other websites that have file formats supported by the PRS 700, and you can access over half a million free public domain titles from Google Books.

With the Sony PRS 700 Reader Library 2.5 PC Software you can transfer your own files like Adobe PDF documents, MS Word files, and files in the BBeB format or any other text file.

Sony PRS 700 Specifications

Size and Weight

• Dimensions: 5 1/9 x 6 7/9 x 13/32 inches (127.6 x 174.3 x 9.7 mm)
• Weight: 10 oz. without soft cover

Display

• Gray Scale: 8-Level Gray Scale
• Resolution: 170 Pixels Per Inch
• Screen Size: 6″ Diagonal Screen
• Technology : E Ink® “Electronic Paper”

Media Formats

• Text: BBeB Book (Marlin), ePub, TXT, RTF, Adobe PDF, MS Word
• Image: JPEG, GIF, PNG, and BMP
• Audio: MP3 and AAC

Memory

• Internal Memory: 512MB, 420 MB available
• Expanded Memory: Support Sony Memory Stick Pro Duo 8 GB, SDHC card expansion up to 32 GB

Sony PRS 700 Versus the Sony 600

The first major difference is that the Sony PRS 700 was only available in black and the Sony PRS600 comes in black, red, and silver. The Sony PRS 600 is just a tiny bit thicker and heavier but hardly notable.

Amazingly, you can get the Sony Digital Reader Touch Edition for under $300 and yet the older Sony PRS 700 goes for as much as $499 from Amazon or $300 used. The Reader Touch Edition gets a 59% of users saying that they would recommend it to a friend while the PRS 700 got 75%.

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