About a month back I bought a Sony Potable Ebook reader (PRS 505) from Argos. But, of late I started using it quite often. It was in my recent trip that I found that this gadget is ideal for reading when you are travelling by flight.

The gadget comes with a nice leather case which gives it the look of a good paperback book. The most striking feature is the use of E-ink. Eink is essentially the Electronic Paper Display (EPD) technology which gives the E-reader, the qualities (or rather the uniqueness) of a paper book. While you are reading an e-book , you will hardly feel the pressure on your eyes. You can read it with the ease;  as if you are reading a normal book. Even if you are using a laptop, it is hard to read an e-book continuously. This gadget solves this problem.

Though this is very portable, I won’t say that it is light weight. But its weight is ideal. It feels like you are holding a 150 page paperback book.

Another sticking feature is its battery life. It can power the gadget for more than 24 hrs time. Well, though this is marketed as an Ebook reader, you can use it to store your image files as well. More over, you can even play your  MP3 and AAC audio. But it is not really a good music player. I still have to rely on my iPod nano 4G for listening to music.

It has a 800.0 MHz Processor and has an Expansion Slot. You can use a  Memory Stick PRO Duo  or SD Memory Card for this. The inbuilt storage is about 225 MB. Since it allows me to carry all my documents and files with me, I extended the memory by adding a 16 GB memory card (SD).

It supports almost all document formats (TXT , PDF , DOC , BBeB , BBeB DRM and RTF ).  You can also store PNG , GIF , JPEG or BMP images in this device. The one which I bought is using  Display Type 6.0 (E-ink) for rendering the e-books.

Sony gives 1 year warranty  and web based support for the product.

Software Requirements

Sony says that it is necessary to have a Windows based system (XP, Vista or Win7) to transfer files to the reader. What they meant this that you can only  install the software that comes along with the gadget in a Windows based machine.

You can use you Linux or Mac system for transferring files.

Using the recommended software

In this case, you have to be in a Windows based machine. The installation process is a simple DIY job. Once you have installed it, you can register the product online. Then you can start adding the files using File—> Add files and drag & drop the files to the reader (displayed in the sidebar as shown below)

In Linux and Mac systems

All you need is an open source solution called ‘Calibre’. You can install it using any standard install command (say – sudo apt-get install or yum).

Once you have installed Calibre, you can start adding the files (see the picture shown below). Now you can transfer them to the device by selecting the ‘Send to device’ option. That’s it!

Other features

It has an a Linkup-USB and you can charge the device using it. You can also buy a charger (as an accessory), but this is not required. The actual screen size is about 6 inch and the battery (Li Ion Battery) gives backup upto about 7500 pages. Using the default storage you can store about 150 books. It takes about 6 hrs to charge the device completely.

And if you don’t have enough money to buy new ebooks, the you can try Project Gutenberg for getting free e-books (mostly classical ones).

There was one issue I faced when I was trying to buy this. It is hard to find this in stores. So it is recommended that you buy it online. In my case, I reserved it online and latter collected it from the shop in high street

It costs 200 GBP here in UK