"A excellent study can be a couple of seconds absent," proclaims the Sony Reader Every day Edition screen because it tries to connect with the Sony store--or to perform the rest involving the unit's wireless Net accessibility. However, in my exams, I had to wait around a good deal extended than a couple of seconds.
That is also bad, since the Sony Reader Every day Edition ($400 as of February 3, 2010) has content material that I might love to download if doing this have been much less of the headache. The Day-to-day Edition is Sony's 1st e-reader to provide wireless use of content (by way of AT&T's 3G wireless network), and Sony has sought to capitalize on that feature by offering not just a bookstore but wireless delivery of newspapers, either by subscription or as single copies. Several big names in day-to-day print U.S. journalism--including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal--are for sale in Sony's Reader Store, which you can entry from the device.
But 3G wireless service was spotty at best in my home in downtown San Francisco. Whatever I tried to do, I received frequent messages advising me to check whether I'd turned on the wireless switch (you get both a hardware switch on the bottom edge of the device and a software setting for toggling the switch on). I managed to subscribe for the digital New York Times through the Sony keep, but at very first I couldn't obtain it: A message reported that the obtain had been interrupted and needed to be restarted from my account page. (In other locations, though the unit had fewer foibles, it was painfully slow to connect.)
By the way, you can transfer commercial and free content material for the Reader after using the included USB cable to attach the device to your PC. In fact, this is the only way to patronize bookstores other than Sony's (you can buy from any e-tailer that supports ePub with Adobe Material Server 4 encryption). Like other Sony Readers, the Everyday Edition also supports AAC, BMP, GIF, JPEG, MP3, PDF, PNG, RTF, and TXT file formats, plus Sony's old BBeB e-book format, in case you have older e-books on hand.
Wireless services and a slightly larger (7-inch-diagonal) E-Ink display that supports 16 shades of gray are the chief distinctions between the Every day Edition and the Touch Edition released last fall: The latter has a 6-inch-diagonal, eight-shade-grayscale display. But the extra real estate mainly extends the height of the Day-to-day Edition, so it seems rather tall and narrow for an e-book reader. It's also a tad fatter (0.6 inch thick) and heavier (12.75 ounces, including the included black cover) than the Touch Edition (0.4 inch thick and 10.1 ounces). Sony offers a cool cover with a built-in reading light for the Daily Edition, as a $60 option.
Like the Touch Edition, the Every day Edition has a touchscreen that you can manipulate with your fingers or with a stylus that slides into the device's upper left corner. You can turn pages forward (but not backward) with a finger swipe, and you get to choose whether to use left-to-right or right-to-lift action for this purpose. This feature generally worked well, but the device was unresponsive to my swipes intermittently, and ultimately I found it a lot less annoying to depend on the hardware page-turn buttons below the display.
You fire up the Reader by sliding a button on the upper left edge. Doing so brings up a Home display with large icons, starting with a thumbnail cover of your most recent reading material on top and your other available books in the middle. At the bottom are icons for accessing your periodicals, other collections, and notes; and below them are tabs leading towards the online bookstore, applications, and settings. Navigating among options seemed a bit slow, but not as slow as on other devices.
Sony supplies several built-in applications--an image viewer, a handwriting utility for capturing notes or doodles, a memo pad, a dictionary, and a music player. I particularly liked the handwriting utility, which did a nice job of interpreting my scrawls and sketching. The Reader remains primarily a reading device, but the included apps complement that primary purpose (the dictionary, for instance, can come in quite handy).
The device comes with a standard headphone jack, and music sounded good through my earbud headphones--this Reader, unlike some others, has enough oomph to deliver loud audio when turned all the way up. (Sony has indicated that it will introduce additional mobile apps going forward.)
I was a lot less impressed by the shopping experience that the device permits. The shop took a while to display, and when it came up, it was neither intuitively organized nor particularly attractive. At the top have been several text links, some of them rather cryptic: Subjects (which lists general book categories), Sections (which includes things like bargain-priced books), Periodicals (newspapers, for example), and Bundles (several books sold together). Next to these was an unappealing reproduction of a New York Post front page.
Below came icons for various best-sellers and then for new arrivals. And below those, a small banner ad appeared. Sony clearly has some distance to go before it catches up with Amazon's excellently organized Kindle storefront.
The newspaper features, though, are compelling. The lengthier display dimensions mean that you can view more newspaper headlines on a single page. And if you subscribe to a newspaper and leave the device's wireless adapter turned on overnight, you'll have the new day's edition waiting for you when you wake up (Sony says that the online Wall Street Journal even offers an automatic afternoon update for its Every day Edition customers). You can also opt to keep several days' worth of material loaded on your Everyday Edition, so you can catch up on the news at your leisure (the device has approximately 2GB of internal memory and can accommodate an SD or Memory Stick expansion card if that's not enough).
But if you do keep your wireless service active overnight, be sure to keep the charging adapter connected so you can replenish the power that the wireless radio gobbles up. Most crucially, you should check the strength of the AT&T 3G signal in your neighborhood, as the whole scheme depends on robust 3G service. It's one thing to head over to an area with good reception when you feel like buying a book, but quite another thing to miss out on your day-to-day newspaper since of poor AT&T reception. (And I do blame AT&T, since I had no trouble downloading subject material to my older, Sprint-provisioned Amazon Kindle 2.)
Oddly, even though the Everyday Edition uses a GSM service, it doesn't currently support international roaming (which is the best reason to go with GSM technology). For now, at least, you can purchase and down load material wirelessly only when you're in the United States and within range of your decent AT&T signal. Since the newspaper support is the best reason to shell out $400 for this device, I'd be wary of making the investment unless I was confident of the quality of the available network support.
