Sony Reader PRS-505 review

Sony's Reader is an eBook viewer that comes in a smart leather case.

It's made of silver plastic with shiny metal strips at the top and bottom that protect the mini-USB, SD and Memory Stick ports, and give the Reader an expensive feel. It's much smaller than the iLiad eBook reader, with a 6in screen compared with the iLiad's 8.1in. Far from being too small, the screen is great: text is easy to read, and it feels more like a real book.

When you hold the Reader, the thumb of your left hand rests naturally on the main page controls. The menu system is simple, with numbered short-cut buttons along the right edge of the screen that let you jump to an item. At first, the navigational button on the bottom right can get confused with the forward and back page controls, but even without a touch screen, the Reader is much easier to use than the iLiad.

It comes with its own simple library software, but the device is also recognised by Adobe and Mobipocket's library software. It supports Word documents, but they must be converted and you need to have Microsoft Office installed on your PC. Unlike the iLiad, the Reader also supports MP3 and AAC files, so you can use it to listen to music. The 192MB of internal memory is slightly larger than the iLiad's, but it's still not sufficient for a music collection. It's a shame Sony hasn't installed an SDHC reader, as the plain SD version supports cards up to just 2GB. However, you can buy an 8GB card for the Memory Stick port.

The controls on the bottom left allow you to turn the page, zoom in and out and place a bookmark. A Bookmarks item on the main start menu lets you jump back into a book at the point you left off. The Reader saves your current page when you switch it off, and it turns back on in less than a second.

The menu system in each book lets you see a table of contents and view a history of the pages you've browsed. Jumping to a page is a matter of typing in the page number using the numbered menu short-cut keys and pressing the button on the navigation wheel. If you press a number button by mistake, you can press the menu button to get back to the page you were viewing.

The Reader is more refined and user-friendly than the iLiad and, although smaller, it's just as comfortable to read, much lighter and feels more sturdy. It isn't cheap, but it's almost half the price of the iLiad. However, £200 is still a lot to pay to read a book, and we hope to see prices come down as more eBook readers are released.