The reading experience is so much like reading a paper novel that any report on it will read like a remedial lesson in using a book. (Note: if you have in fact forgotten how to use a book, it's time to step away from the keyboard.) Nevertheless, there are a few observations to make.

One: text looks like it does in a book. That sounds banal, but the effect is something extraordinary. The screen doesn't wash out under bright light (though glare can be an issue, as it can with glossy paper), you can still view it perfectly from the most extreme of angles, and the text has the kind of detail that can be hard to replicate on screen. At the smallest size, it is possible to detect a slight blurring around parts of the letters, but 'medium' and 'large' modes are nearly indistinguishable from a book page without peering closely at the screen.

The view is good from any angle

Two: text does not look like it does in a book. I know, I know (see above), but the textual facsimile isn't perfect. The background for the screen is a light gray, like using bad recycled paper. And the text is not a pure black but a darker gray. The effect is not unpleasant and doesn't appear to lead to eyestrain, but it's something to be aware of if you're a purist.

Three: books don't flash when you turn pages; Readers do. I showed the reader to my wife, a professor of great learning and refinement. Her comments: "Wow" regarding the display, followed by "Does it always flash like that when you turn a page?" The sad answer is that yes, it does in fact do this every single time you turn a page.

Whenever the screen needs to refresh, it first flashes the display to black, then back to whatever image is next slated to appear. This is a limitation of the current E Ink technology, which relies on charged pigment balls sandwiched between electrodes. These balls have to be "reset" to form a new image, and even when they are, slight ghosting is sometimes visible from the last page displayed. If you buy a Reader, be prepared to explain this to everyone who sees the device. If saying "pigment balls" makes you giggle, you probably don't have the money to buy one anyway.

Four: the Delay. After noticing the Flash, you'll quickly pick up on the Delay. It takes about two seconds to turn an e-book page. After pressing the page turn button, nothing happens for a second or so, then the screen flashes black, and then the next page appears. You get used to it, but it can prove mildly annoying, especially when scrolling through menu options. That's right: each click of the directional arrow requires two seconds before control returns (though it can often do this by flashing only a small portion of the screen).

The annoyance is less mild when it comes to PDFs. If you're a business traveler or a tech junkie, you might have visions of using the Reader to catch up on reports and whitepapers. PDFs can take longer to cycle through, though (I've seen times as long as seven seconds), and text is generally not as clear as with e-books (there are only two zoom levels: ‘fit to width' and ‘fit to screen').

This can make text hard to read, and though Sony says the issue can be addressed by formatting PDFs to better fit the screen dimensions, this isn't practical for most PDFs. A better alternative is...

Five: rotating the screen. Holding down the little magnifying glass button for five seconds rotates the screen into horizontal position. This makes reading PDFs much easier at the cost of seeing fewer lines of text at once. It also means that the page turn buttons aren't quite as perfectly placed, but in many ways this is a superior reading experience.

Landscape view: it's delicious with coffee.

Six: bookmarking is in, annotating is out. Bookmarking couldn't be simpler; just press the little 'bookmark' button and the top right corner of the page turns down graphically. The device knows exactly where you are in the text, even if pages are later resized or the view is rotated. It's simple to do, and just as simple to jump to bookmarked passages.

It's not possible to annotate documents, though, and in fact the thought of doing so using the directional buttons and an onscreen keyboard makes me weep just a little inside. You won't be marking up the annual report during the flight, but then, it is called the Reader, so you probably knew that.

Seven: autosyncing is here. The first version of the Reader didn't support autosyncing of library content to the device. The new eBook Library desktop app can autosync music, photos, and documents whenever the Reader is plugged in. It's a welcome change.

Unfortunately, Mac and Linux users won't be doing any autosyncing. Despite the fact that the Reader is powered by Montavista Linux and uses code from projects like OpenSSL and Freetype, the desktop app needed to access to Connect store and sync the device is for Windows only.

If something's worth doing at all, it's worth doing well 

The Reader isn't just a reader. It's also a really half-assed music player and grayscale photo viewer. The upside is that it handles plenty of document formats and supports memory cards, making it easy to boost the 200MB of internal storage to something truly useful.

Unfortunately, someone dropped a great big can of Suck into the water supply over at Sony just as these features were added. The music feature, for instance, doesn't support albums. It doesn't support playlists. Every song you bring over to the Reader appears in a single long list. When you start the music playing, it plays through this list completely. And then it starts over. And over again. Like a Terminator, it stops for nothing, even continuing to play when the device is powered off and back on. (I learned this the hard way while draining my battery. The Reader had played through my brief playlist about thirty times, even with a couple of power-offs in there.)

I hope you were planning to play these tracks in order?

It is nice to have background music when reading, but be aware that this drains the battery quickly.

Pictures are also limited, though there is a slideshow option. Photos shot in plenty of light look sharp, but those without enough light call for squints just to make out the subject matter amid all that wash of gray. It's not clear what the level of consumer desire is for a gray scale photo viewer, but I'm going out on a limb and guessing that it is not high.

It's a Reader showing a picture of me holding a Reader. Oh, the recursion!

Let's be clear: I would rather have these features than not have them, but it would have been nice to make them a bit more fully-assed.

I've got the power

Because the Reader doesn't need power to display pages (only to turn them), power consumption isn't measured in hours but page turns. Sony says that the included battery can handle 7,500 page turns on every full charge.

Although there's not really a need to shut off the device, Sony does provide two ways to do so in order to keep buttons from being pressed while the Reader isn't being used. Using the power switch puts the Reader into "sleep mode," from which it takes about four seconds to wake.

It's also possible to do a "Device Shutdown," though you probably won't need to. The option, in fact, is buried deep in the settings menu where casual users will probably never see it. Using this option truly shuts the device down. When waking from Device Shutdown, a startup screen appears in six seconds, and the Reader is fully usable after 50 seconds.

Sony Connect

Though Sony threw in the towel on the music side of its online store Connect earlier this year, the e-books division is still alive and healthy. Well, it's alive, anyway.

The e-books that you can purchase from Connect are essentially facsimiles of their print counterparts, right down to the "If you purchase this book without a cover..." warning on the copyright page. The text can be set to three sizes, but otherwise the experience is much like reading a book.

Sony claims more than 20,000 titles for the store, and the selection certainly seems varied enough to keep readers occupied. The store is simple to use, if spartan, with capsule reviews from Publishers Weekly and space for user comments. Unfortunately, that space is largely empty; even such popular titles as Freakonomics, The Tipping Point, and Stephen Colbert's I Am America (And So Can You!) have no comments yet. This sort of thing makes Connect feel like a ghost town filled with vending machines; you can get what you want, and you know that people must come through to top up the supply of Cokes, but boy, it sure looks empty.

The Sony Connect store. It works.

Despite the 20,000 titles, you won't find Harry Potter, so the whole experience of using Connect can feel a bit like trying to track down music from your favorite bands on sites like Amazon's new MP3 store or eMusic. You might get lucky, you might not, but you won't know in advance unless you're aware of just what label each band is signed to.

These may sound like digs at the store, which feels sparse after encountering the abundance of an online bazaar like Amazon.com, and they are. But if you simply want to a buy a couple of e-books, are happy with Connect's selection, and want to move them quickly to your Reader, the experience is fast and seamless.

Books range in price from $5 to $15 for most titles.

Who's it for?

Despite some quirks, the new Reader is a beautiful device that excels at what it was designed to do: display e-books. It's also a reminder that Sony can still develop some incredibly slick hardware in slim packages. At $300 a pop, though, it's fair to ask how many people are going to buy it.

Sony offers 100 free "classics" from Connect and will even throw in some free engraving. All the same, buyers really need to love both gadgets and reading to make this a compelling purchase. For the non-gadget lover, paper books are still hard to beat. Even consultants who are gone for a week at a time don't have enough hours of downtime to plow through more than a book or two on a trip; since the e-books aren't much cheaper than paperbacks, the Reader saves little money or space in the duffel.

For the gadget lover who doesn't love reading, music and audiobooks will be preferred, and a more traditional PMP would be of more use.

Another satisfied customer

Even gadget lovers who do enjoy reading are probably toting laptops along on trips already, so hauling around an extra (breakable) gadget just to make text a bit more pleasant onscreen seems like a hard sell, and it leaves you with nothing to display on the bookshelf back home.

Still, if the Reader sounds like the sort of gadget you can't live without and you can live with its quirks, it's a superbly built device with a screen that will blow you away. It comes highly recommended, but only to those certain they have a use for it. Everyone else will want to check one out, wonder at the screen, then leave it on the shelf.

The Good:

• Incredible screen with superb text reproduction
• PDF support
• Excellent build quality, weight, and design
• Simple bookmarking 

The Bad:

• Screen flashes when changing the display
• Delay in moving between pages
• Music player lacks useful options
• Dropping $10 on an e-book 

The Ugly:

• Explaining "the Flash"... again

原文链接: http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/sony-reader-review.ars