The Sony PRS-300 Pocket Edition e-Reader is a marvelous bit of kit. I’ve been using mine now for a month, and it’s travelled from one side of the world to the other and back again with me. I’ve recently been in Australia for holidays visiting family and took this with me only 2 days after getting it as an X-Mas present. It handled well on the flight from Heathrow to Abu-Dhabi to Singapore to Brisbane and back again. I was able to use it in bright light (in Australia) with the attached reading light in low light conditions on the plane and just about everywhere in between.

I did find the software that came with it a bit lacking in functionality and so came across this bit of kit called calibre – E-book management. it’s much more thought out and comes with some handy tools such as converters and news “fetchers” that allow you to set news websites which it goes off and fetches and formats it for use on your ereader.

I currently have about 20 books on my device which I’m working my way through, I usually read 2 or 3 books in one go so having this is a real boon. Reading the news is good as well as I can set it to retrieve it before I leave in the morning and read it on the train, so it doesn’t take up time in the morning and on my lunch break when I would usually do those tasks.

The battery life is excelent on this. I’ve not run the battery down in all the time I’ve had it. I guess mainly due to the fact that I get the news every (other) day and the time it’s plugged into the USB port it actually charges whilst it’s there. Bonus!

One downer is that in the UK there are not as many places I can find to get the electronic content and the selections are still quite limited. Although a lot of newer titles are available for download, I’ve been using this to re-read some older series I read years ago, and coverage of these older titles seems to be a bit patchy.  In one case I’ve got 7 out of 8 titles (the one missing is right in the middle and is a pivitol point in the story line).

I’ve not had a chance to use the device yet for technical manuals and I’m not really sure I want to just yet, I am concerned about how ther device will automatically re-format the manual to fit on the smaller screen, I guess I could just load one of the many PDF’s of manuals I have onto it to find out, however at the moment I just can’t be bothered.

There is a lot of talk about why someone would want a decive to make phone calls, a device to take photos, a device to listen to music and now a device to read books on, why not do it all in one. Well let me explain why I’ll use separate devices for each of the tasks.

Phone calls : Use my phone, it makes calls, sends texts and I now get skype on it. I really don’t want it for anything else.

Photos :  My phone doesn’t take photos anywere near as good as my camera, I have one mini-slr for holidays and taking my “good” photos, and a normal digicam which I carry most days with me for “snapping”. I get brilliant battery life out of these devices and superior photo quality.

Music : I have an iPod Classic. I’ve had lots of MP3 players over the years and I finally forked out the money for an iPod and now I’d never go back.

All of the above if used on a phone (photos & music) run down  my phone battery, why would I want to do that?

and now for reading ebooks. Why would I want to do that on a small phone screen, a small ipod screen when I now have a device with a screen that is almost the size of a normal paperback and I don’t need to strain my eyes or run run down my other device’s battery.

In the old days I would have carried a book, instamatic camera, a cd player and my phone in my bag so why not cayy a didicam, ebook reader and phone along with my iPod. putting everything into one device to save space doesn’t really cut it.

And basically I just like having one device that does it’s job, that way the innovation and research and quality get targeted to a specific task and you get multiple devices at the top of their game not one device that is “Ok” across the board.

I realise that I’ve gone on for a bit now so I’ll call it a day and sign off.

Later!