The Sony PRS-600: Could Its Touchscreen Be More Liability Than Asset?

With the recent launch of the Sony PRS 600, bookworms and gadget geeks alike are now scouring the web, hoping to find more about Sony’s latest addition to its growing family of ebook readers.

Being a little of both myself, I did the same and found this short but interesting post at engadget.com, complete with videos. The review highlighted a major feature of the Sony PRS-600 where it should have supposedly soundly beaten the Amazon Kindle – the touchscreen.

On the one hand, its being relatively button-free (although it still has a few buttons for page forward and backward, home, and search) allows the user hand or stylus interaction with the e-reader, making annotating and highlighting easier, and allowing faster page turns.

There’s one small catch, though — the glare that tends to be more pronounced on the touchscreen. That, plus its weak contrast as compared to the Sony PRS-505, (again, perhaps owing to the new type of screen) makes reading on the PRS 600, well, not so reader-friendly. And isn’t the better reading experience the main reason why we get portable ebook readers in the first place? Hmmm… it turns out this “small” catch may not be quite so small after all.

Many ebook reader fans aren’t thrilled with this development as well. When I checked out the comments section of the post, I found not too few individuals who completely agreed that an e-reader with a glare issue is no fun at all – even with the touchscreen thrown in. Here’s part of one of the comments:

“Touch seems like the new fad right now, but as has been said in this thread already, just puts smudges on your screen and what’s the point if the contrast is bad. It’s primary function is a reading device, not an iPhone wanna-be.”

Puts it quite aptly, don’t you think? Oh, and there’s even one comment purportedly from the same guy whose video comparisons were used by the engadget.com post, who said that after a whole weekend using both the PRS-600 and the PRS-505, he decided in the end to “put the PRS-600 back in its box,” and send it back to Sony. Now, whether there is truth to this “original poster” comment or not, one thing’s clear: the touchscreen isn’t as great as people expected it to be.

With its $299 pricetag, the Sony PRS-600 is said to have been designed as the Kindle 2’s direct competitor. The touch was a nice try, but no thanks. Convenience is welcome but not to the point of forgoing readability. This is where the Kindle 2 comes out ahead of the PRS-600. It may not come with a touchscreen, but its glare-free, crystal clear reading experience is more than enough for most people. Plus, the Amazon Kindle 2 and the Kindle DX are currently the only ebook readers in the market today that offer wireless capability.