14 DAY TRIAL // As you might recall from one of our articles published yesterday, Sony has initiated a campaign dubbed “Reader Revolution,” meant to convince more people to take up reading. However, as we were all expecting, there's also a marketing gimmick behind this whole “social” initiative, since the Japanese company has just introduced the third generation of its portable eBook reader, the Reader Digital Book.
The new model, PRS-700, is the first device of this type from Sony to feature a touchscreen display. The 6-inch screen allows users to flip pages with a slide of the finger. In addition, readers can easily search terms within a document or book, create notes using the virtual keyboard, and highlight text with the included stylus pen. Furthermore, they can even zoom in on the text by tapping on the screen, five pre-set text sizes being available right out of the box.
And, since we're on the subject of the built-in display, it's also quite important to mention that it employs high contrast electronic paper display technology, which allows users to read text or view graphics even in bright sunlight. However, for those situations when the ambient light level is rather low, Sony has also equipped its third generation reader with a LED reading light.
As far as memory is concerned, this third iteration of Sony's eBook reader allows users to store up to 350 eBooks right in its internal memory, but they can always increase this amount via MS Duo media or SD memory cards. Furthermore, the device requires a fairly low amount of power, since one battery charge will be enough for around 7,500 pages of continuous reading.
The Portable eBook Reader from Sony also offers a very high level of versatility, since it supports multiple file formats for eBooks, personal documents and music. Plus, it's accompanied by the eBook Library 2.5 PC software, which lets users transfer Adobe PDF documents with reflow capability, Microsoft Word documents, BBeB files and other text file formats to the Reader in a very fast and easy manner.
The device is not exactly very cheap but, at around 400 US dollars, it offers a very good price/quality ratio, compared with some of the other similar products you might find on the market (still more expensive than Amazon's kindle, though).
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