What a wonderful name! Sony just never seems to get things right with marketing and branding. Between the death of the minidisc as a viable digital format for music, and it’s complete failure to capture the MP3 market, they stand to miss out on the ebook market as well, just for lack of features and poor naming. (“Reader”? How generic can you get?)
A friend in Germany pointed me at the iRex Iliad. In terms of features, it seems to have several key advantages over the Sony Reader:
| Feature | Sony Reader | iRex Iliad |
| Read PDFs | Yes | Yes |
| Play MP3s | Yes | Yes |
| Memory | Memory Stick, SD | Internal1, CF, SD, USB keydisk2 |
| Network | 10/100Mb Ethernet, 802.11b WiFi | |
| Battery Life (reading) | 7,500 page turns | 20-30 hours |
| Dimensions | 176 x 124 x 14 mm, 250g | 155x216x16 mm, 350g |
| Resolution | 6 inch (diagonal), 800×600 pixels, 4 gray levels, | 8.1 inch (diagonal), 1024×768 pixels, 16 gray levels |
| Input | None | Touch (Stylus) |
Notes
1 There are approximately 200MB of unused, on-board memory, but that’s used for font installation as well.
2 The USB keydisk is an amazing feature; it apparently can act as a USB host, so I can plug any keydisk in, and read files off of it. If I was able to transfer files from the USB keydrive onto a CF/SD card as well, that would be cool. But either way… just being able to plug in a USB keydrive as external storage is some smart thinking.
Comments
All told, the Iliad looks like a much nicer product.
- [Size] It is significantly larger than the Sony; it is just about the size of a printed page. For a device that you read on, that matters a lot.
- [Input] The Sony has no input on the device; it looks like I can scribble on PDFs using the Iliad. This is critical as well; although I am not terribly concerned with being able to “write”, per se, I do want the ability to underline and otherwise mark critical sections of text. If the handwriting recognition is good enough (or I can “zoom in” to create hi-res handwriting), then this would be an amazing tool for grading documents of all kinds.
- [Battery] I can’t tell, but it looks like the battery on the Iliad isn’t as good as the Sony. This is probably due to the runtime on the device remaining active for handling input, etc. Ideally, they ship the device with the ability to lock it into a low-power mode, where all I do is read and turn pages. That way, I can either run in an “interactive” mode, or I can just read text.
Those are the features, in order, that matter most to me. For that reason, I’m eager to hear more about the Iliad, and hope that its April release isn’t a vaporware target. Waiting a bit (but not forever) for a device that’s almost the size of a printed page (vs. the size of a paperback) is absolutely worth it—since the display technology on both is practically identical (both use eInk technology).
Must… wait…