Sony was busy squeezing minutes of more music onto minidiscs as Apple was inventing the iPod and its days of music, but now Apple is busy making iPods play videos on their tiny screens for the gimmicky fun of it all as Sony is blowing my mind with something straight out of the last decade. Sony is finally going to make something that should have happened happen. Sadly, no one will really give a damn.
This is text on a digital device that is sleek and sexy and perfect. The new Sony Reader goes on sale sometime in the next few months and it's making me that much more excited about reading. And you might be thinking that I'm a big sack of crap that loves anything with a lithium battery inside, anything that syncs with my computer--but I swear that this is different. Or, at least I swear that this is as big to reading as the iPod was to music. I swear that, because all the big geeky bastards are swearing that.
You probably saw something that looked a lot like this back in 1997, but this time it's different. This time it doesn't suck. This time it doesn't hurt your eyes. This time, they're saying that the clarity of the screen rivals actual paper. And everyone that came in contact with it at the Consumer Electronics Show is vouching for that.
As far as I know, this is the first consumer product to use what they're calling eInk technology. Text that is BLACK black, against a backdrop that is paper-white. A screen that interacts with light the way that light interacts with an actual book. A screen that you can read from any angle, in bright sunlight or beside a dim bedside lamp. The only place you can't read it is in the dark, because it's just like real paper in a real book, you dummy.
Only it holds 80 books in its memory and has a memory card slot (even taking SD cards, besides Sony's expected Memory Sticks) to hold even more--to even hold MP3s because why the hell not leave your iPod at home for once?
It downloads all kinds of purchased, rights-managed e-books from every publisher, but it also displays any PDF and any RSS feed automatically fed every time you sync it. So besides novels, you could be reading this site on it right now. Or any other blog. Or news site. You could listen to your iPod and read a big old newspaper or you could listen to MP3s on this thing as you read through Google News. Granted, neither of those things truly excite me about the Sony Reader--I just want to have something less annoying to cozy up with and read. Something not so heavy. Something that I don't have to hold open. No matter how lazy that sounds.
And if none of that has you as excited as it has me--think of this... the battery life is 7,500 page turns. It isn't in hours you see, because you can put it in its dock and charge it, then leave it on a page, set it down for an entire year and come back to that very same page and you'll still have 7,499 more page turns before it needs to recharge again. What I'm saying is, displaying a page draws no power whatsoever. No need for a bookmark, it is always open to the page where you left off.
Then there's the crystal clear graphic novels and greyscale photos and all of that, but I'm done. You can click here if you're like me.
If you're still not sold, I'll leave you with a quote from Gizmodo...
To give you an idea of just how good this display looks… I walked up to the counter, looked at the text on the screen and asked, “So when will you have working units to play with?” The reply: “This is a working reader.” I mistakenly though the text on the screen was some kind of plastic overlay—that’s how ink-like it looked.
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