Sometime last week, I posted a quick wish list that I would like to have by this summer. Although I've entered several devices, my budget is still a limiting factor and my girlfriend insists that I can only get one out of the expensive list of items I presented. With a $600 budget, I can either get a Playstation 3 console, a GPS navigator or a digital reader. Based on the header, it's not a surprise that I chose purchasing a digital reader above the other two that I mentioned. While PS3 is within my price range, playing video games is not something that I look forward to on a regular basis. I'm not planning on wasting my time playing video games on any given day, hence I view it as a counter-productive activity. A GPS navigator on the other hand can be useful on regular occasions but traveling to random places is not something that I do. Although it is a helpful device, most of my traveling are spent between home, work, friend's house and close by venues. In actuality, the decision came down to either this (GPS) or the digital reader which was a tough call since I wanted both.
The main reason that I decided to go with a digital reader is because I love to read books and portability is often an issue. While small novel-sized books are easy to carry, most of the books that I read are technical and can be bulky in sizes. Since I'll be carrying this device more, I can potentially read 3x more books as compared to carrying separate books. Since it (either Kindle or Sony's reader) can store almost a hundred of books, I don't to worry about carrying books around and switching between titles is a snap. I'm considering two digital readers, which is Amazon's Kindle and Sony's PRS-505. The Kindle is priced at $399 while Sony's version is priced at $299 (can be lowered to $199 using $100 off if SonyStyle credit card is used). At this point, the price difference between both devices is $200. The question that I constantly ask myself is, is spending an extra $200 to purchase the Kindle worth it?
Let's look at the major differences:
- Kindle has wireless delivery of electronic books, blogs and newspapers while Sony doesn't. In all honesty, I don't need to purchase books on the fly and loading ebooks from my PC is enough.
- Sony supports PDF while Kindle needs conversion to MOBI format. While some people might disagree, this is a big deal for me since most ebooks are in PDF format now a days.
- Kindle is a first generation while Sony's PRS 505 is a second generation from its PRS 500 predecessor. One thing for sure here is that, while both devices has their imperfections, Sony has already ironed out a few of their early flaws.
- Kindle has a search feature, dictionary and wikipedia definition while Sony doesn't. This is actually a disappointment for me since having these features would be nice, but then again, I would have to remind myself if this is something that I can live without since we live in an information age. Hmm..
Going back to the basics, the size of the screen is pretty similar between both readers with slight differences in page formatting display of data. By looking at comparison pictures, Sony has the better design while Kindle has more features to offer as what I stated above. I've read almost hundreds of reviews from other users and videos and I'm still having a hard time deciding on which one to go with. I'll give this some more time and do more research since this is going to be an expensive purchase. I'm just hoping that when the day comes, they don't release a newer version of one or the other, otherwise I'll be really upset. With the ever-changing technology, I won't be surprise.