Sony has been thrilled with sales of its eReaders over the Christmas period, but could their comparative success be about to be eclipsed by the arrival of an Apple tablet?
We’ll know better later today but, in the meantime, I have been trying out the new Sony Reader Daily Edition for the past three weeks to see if it is as hot as the news it provides.
The Daily Edition is the latest and most expensive of Sony’s Reader offerings, retailing at $400, compared to the Touch version at $300 and entry-level Pocket at $200.
It adds a 3G wireless data connection for the first time, a feature the Amazon Kindle has had from the start.
This enables the Daily Edition’s distinguishing feature – overnight downloads of newspapers and quick book downloads without the need to tether the device to a computer.
It’s certainly a nice experience to wake up in the morning, turn the device on and be alerted to the fact that the latest editions of the Financial Times, New York Times and Wall Street Journal (subscriptions required) are ready and waiting to be read on-screen.
However, I found the actual experience of reading them unsatisfying compared to the same experience on a computer or in the paper.
Broadsheet newspapers are large format and the Daily Edition has only a seven-inch screen. To crunch their papers down to size, the publishers have forsaken newspaper design to reduce their front pages to a few headlines and brief introductions, interspersed with black-and-white photos, making them visually unappealing.
Go deeper and design elements are lost completely, with sections and stories reduced to directory listings, making it harder to find your way around the paper and sample content.
I much prefer the original newspapers or their Web versions with their own distinctive designs – PDFs of the actual FT newspaper are also available through its website.
Obviously, colour is missing in the Daily Edition and I found the E Ink display lacking in contrast and hard to read in a lot of lighting situations – perhaps because of the extra touch layer added to the screen.
The Daily Edition works better as a book reader – the format is more akin to a paperback and text sizes can be easily adjusted.
But if that is what you will mostly use the device for, the cheaper Pocket or Touch versions will suffice.
Sony has obviously worked hard to improve its Reader series and there are some nice touches. It is packaged with a leather cover and its size is slimmer and more portable than the Kindle – I found myself reading more because the Reader was so easy to carry around and read in spare moments.
A pen with the device allows notes to be scribbled on screen and saved. Words can be highlighted and definitions provided by the included dictionary. There is 2Gb of internal memory and the ability to add Sony or SD memory cards, allowing music to be played and photos added.
But for all this, the Daily Edition’s lack of colour, less than stellar screen, low sensitivity to touch and slow processing of page turns and other functions gave me the impression that eReader technology in general is not yet at a level that makes it ready to graduate beyond the single-functionality of reading the black-and-white text of a paperback-sized book.
