Gizmodo hands on with the Sony Reader

[Alexander Turcic]

If you're one of the hundreds of thousands of gadget-crazed technophiles descending upon Las Vegas these days, you should definitely head for the Sony booth to check out their E Ink-based Sony Reader. Gizmodo had a hands on and is thoroughly excited:

Sony's new 'Reader' is fantastic and we want one immediately. The price point is going to be painfully high, with guesstimates in between $300 and $400, but it's everything the Librié—Sony’s first-generation, Japan-only ePaper-based eBook reader (whew)—should have been. Not only is the display amazing (and amazingly readable), but Sony promised us that there would be no restriction on moving over your own documents to the Reader—the DRM schmutz has been greatly decreased. Not only will the Reader support PDF files natively, but Sony's PC syncing software will automatically convert .doc files with most formatting intact. eBooks will be an optional purchase through Sony’s Connect service.

The article goes on claiming that the Sony Reader supports RSS with images. My humble question: how can it support RSS without connectivity?

Related: Will Sony help the e-book market to grow?, Sony's new e-book reader officially announced

[Lorphos]

The windows software fetches your feeds and prepares them so you can then read them (offline) on the Sony Reader.

[Alexander Turcic]

That's what I thought. So it's meaningless for all RSS feeds that only display summaries and link to the full article. Unless, of course, their software is as complete as Sunrise or iSilo to work as full offline browsers.

[Laurens]

If Sony opens up their BBeB specs, I might get round to adding support for it in Sunrise XP.

[Lorphos]

They promised the specs would be released no later than the Sony Reader launch.

[doctorow]

That's cool! If BBeB becomes an "open format", I don't actually care what formats the Sony Reader supports. As long as there is a way to transcode any content.

[rmeister0]

"Not only will the Reader support PDF files natively, but Sony's PC syncing software will automatically convert .doc files with most formatting intact."

This is highly encouraging.

[Brian]

Steve Rubel at Micro Persuasion makes a point that I've been making and strongly agree with:

Gizmodo has the goods on a new device from Sony called the Reader that displays text and images in a very readable form. I am assuming the device has wifi or cellular wireless connectivity because it has support for RSS with images. As Gizmodo says, the digital morning paper is finally about to happen.

(UPDATE: A commenter says there's no connectivity in this baby. It's updated like an iPod. Still, you can feel that the possibility is not that far off)

Steve, that's where the iRex Iliad comes in...