Sony’s not taking competition from the Amazon Kindle lying down. The company has added touchscreens to its three e-reader models, while switching to the new ‘Pearl’ screen from E Ink for better contrast and improving the user interface on the devices.
What the company hasn’t done is drop the price. Sony’s cheapest e-reader will cost $180–and that’s without Wi-Fi or 3G–while Amazon charges $140 for the Wi-Fi version of the Kindle.
“The bottom line is we didn’t want to compete on price,” says Steve Haber, president of Sony’s digital reading business division. “We wanted to build quality and overall experience. We want to give consumers the feel of buying an e-reader, not a toy.”
Sony three e-reader models are the Pocket, Touch and Daily Edition. The $180 Pocket Reader has a 5-inch display, 2 GB memory and will come without W-Fi or 3G access. That means users can only load books by connecting the device to their PC using a USB cable.
The $230 Touch Edition has a 6-inch display, 2 GB onboard memory, expansion slots for up to 32 GB of additional memory, the ability to play audio files and Wi-Fi connectivity.
The $300 Daily Edition model includes both Wi-Fi and 3G connectivity and sports an even larger 7-inch display. It too has 2 GB of onboard memory and an expansion slot for up to 32 GB additional.
Sony’s new e-readers raise the stakes in the e-reader market. In July, Amazon introduced the third generation of its Kindle e-reader, including a Wi-Fi only model, and slashed the price to make it more competitive with rival Barnes & Noble’s Nook. The move took a toll on smaller e-reader makers who haven’t been able to compete on either price or scale of their book stores. Earlier this month, Foxit announced it will stop development on its eSlick e-reader. Plastic Logic canceled its plans to bring its e-reader to market, while Cool-er’s e-readers have been listed out of stock in the U.S. for months.
Sony is betting on better design to draw in users. Its new e-readers are colorful (hot pink, red, silver and black) and have an aluminum body that gives them a better finish and feel compared to the plasticky- shell of the Kindle or the Nook.
But the biggest change has been the introduction of the touchscreen across all models. Previously only one of the models called Touch Edition had a touchscreen.
Unlike the capacitive touchscreens popular on mobile phones, Sony’s e-readers use optical touchscreen technology so it responds to both finger and a stylus.
A major problem with the earlier version of Sony’s touchscreen e-reader was the touchscreen layer added to the top of the display. The layer decreased contrast, making the e-reader’s display difficult to read compared to the Kindle or the Nook, and also offered a sluggish response to touch. The optical touchscreen technology seems to have solved some of the problems and in my brief hands-on with the devices I found the display to be startlingly responsive and quick.
The Pearl display has also helped improve contrast and render crisper text.
“The number one focus for us is the reading experience,” says Haber.”The e-reader is not the Swiss Army knife of devices so we have done everything to make the experience immersive.”
Over the next few weeks, Sony also plans to launch mobile apps of its reader software for the iPhone, iPad and Android.
In improvements to the user interface, Sony will incorporate book reviews from the GoodReads site into its book store. It has also expanded the news stand section of its book store and partnered with more news publishers such as The Guardian and The Harvard Business Review.
Sony hopes to ship the Touch and Pocket models in the next few days. The Daily Edition e-reader will not be available till early November.
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Photo: Sony Touch e-reader/Sony
