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Sony Reader PRS-650 Touch Edition review

Our Rating :
Price when reviewed : £200
inc VAT

It’s incredibly smooth to use and the handling of documents is superb, but it’s expensive and the Kindle has a wider range of new books.

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Book support is getting a lot better, with a wide range of titles available from stores including Waterstones, Coolerbooks, WH Smiths and the new Kobo Books. Typically, books are a little more expensive than those in the Amazon Kindle Store and you may have to hunt around to find the book you want, as not every store carries the same range.

One new feature is the support for library books. Using this you can ‘rent’ a book for a set period of time from your local library, after which they’re deleted from your device. There are currently 50 and you can find them on the Sony Reader website. There are a few restrictions to the service: you have to be a member of the library in question and each library only has a set number of each title for rent. When the rentals hits that number you can’t borrow a book.

We’re rather taken with the PRS-650. It’s incredibly smooth to use and works brilliantly with all forms of documents. The wide range of formats it supports means that you can choose what you want to put on it. It’s a little expensive, though, and the number and prices of books available can’t match those on the Amazon Kindle store. For the latest books and pure simplicity, the cheaper Kindle is a better choice for most people, but if you want to choose what you want to read and from where, and look at a lot of PDFs, the PRS-650 is a great choice.

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Details

Price £200
Details www.sony.co.uk
Rating ****

Hardware

Viewable size 6.0in
Native resolution 600×800
Touchscreen y/n yes
Capacity 2,048MB
Memory card support Memory Stick Pro Duo, SDHC
Size 119x168x10mm
Weight 215g
Battery and charge options Li-ion, USB
eReader Battery life 10,000
Wireless networking support N/A
3G? no
Ports USB, 3.5mm headphone

Format Support

eReader TXT support yes
eReader HTML support no
eReader RTF support yes
eReader PDF support yes
eReader ePub support yes
eReader MOBI support no
eReader Amazon AZW support no
eReader Microsoft Word support yes
Audio MP3 playback Yes
Audio WMA playback No
Audio WMA-DRM playback No
Audio AAC playback Yes
Audio Protected AAC playback No
Audio OGG playback No
Audio WAV playback No
Audio Audible playback No
Image BMP support Yes
Image JPEG support Yes
Image TIFF support No

Buying Information

Price £200
Warranty one year RTB
Supplier http://www.waterstones.com
Details www.sony.co.uk

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