Tuesday, August 04, 2009

Sony Reader vs. Kindle!

Amazon's Kindle has been slaughtering the e-book reader niche market and is currently sitting on top of the mountain. Other companies have been trying to get them off it, but so far no one's been able to do it. Sony is putting their name into the hat and is entering the game with not one, but two e-readers! The PRS-300, called the Pocket and the PRS-600, otherwise known as the Touch.

The specs are as follows:




The latter (pictured left, not to scale) is the 6-inch resistive touchscreen model replacing the PRS-700, with Memory Stick / Duo and SD card slots. The backlighting layer from its predecessor has been dropped to improve touch responsiveness and to alleviate concerns of glare. It also comes packing a stylus and a digitized copy of the Oxford American English Dictionary and will be available in red, black, and silver. The Pocket Edition, on the other hand, is your standard fare with no touchscreen or expandable disk port, and palettes including blue, silver, and rose. Both models have USB 2.0, 512MB internal memory, and no WiFi whatsoever -- Sony assures us a WiFi version is coming and there'll be news on those coming soon, but this isn't it. There's also Mac compatibility, a first for the series, that's trickling down to older models via a firmware update.
Sony's really risking it all just to beat Kindle! Besides putting in two gadgets against the Kindle, they're also pricing it lower: The Pocket at $ 199 and the Touch at $ 299. They're also dropping the Bestseller prices from $ 11.99 to $ 9.99. Personally, I would prefer with the Pocket not just because its cheaper, but also because it seems more pocket friendly (hence the name?) as I really have no use for a touchscreen right now (especially if you have an iPhone or iPod touch). This goes then to my next query: why two devices? Isn't it better to have one quality product where they can focus their Research & Development and their marketing on?

Does this mean that this will beat Kindle? Will Sony's de-pricing beat the Amazon brand behemoth?

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