Sony announced their new Sony Reader PRS-900 this morning – with a 7″ screen, a $399 price, and 3G wireless from AT&T. The Sony 900 also has a touchscreen.
The Sony Reader 900 will be available starting December 2009 (the 600 is available now) -
Sony Reader PRS-900 - The Hidden One
Sony consider this a rival to the Kindle 2. Which is strange considering its $100 more expensive. Shouldn’t they be going after the Kindle DX with this?
Sony had a press conference this morning in New York – 10:30 am EST.
The items announced were -
- Sony PRS 900 Reader – A 7″ eReader with 3G wireless and Touch capabilities.
- $399 price and a December release.
- That publishing deals will be announced in the next few weeks.
- 8,500+ retail outlets will be carrying Sony Readers this holiday season.
- Includes Best Buy, BJs, Borders, Sam’s Club, Staples, Target, WalMart, and Toys ‘R’ Us.
- The 40,000 books of the New York Public Library will be available to readers.
- Library Finder that supposedly lets you find a local library and then check out books in ePub and Adobe DRM.
- Library eBooks Expire in either 21 or 30 days.
- The Library books initiative is in conjunction with OverDrive.
- AT&T provides the 3G. Wireless Syncing is included.
- The Press Release clearly says readers will be able to download newspapers and magazines.
- Free basic wireless connectivity for Sony Daily Edition.
- Landscape Mode.
- 16 levels of grayscale.
- Sony PRS-300 (at $199) and Sony PRS-600 for $299 are now available for purchase.
The Conference was supposed to be August 24th and then moved by a day for some reason.
- This Sony Daily Edition Press Release has the scoop.
- Teleread are attending the conference and will have updates. CrunchGear are live blogging.
How does this compare with Kindle 2? With Kindle DX?
Well there won’t be a Sony Reader PRS-900 review till December. Given the details of the Daily edition, my thoughts are -
- Doesn’t really compare with the Kindle 2 as $100 extra for the solitary benefit of the touchscreen is too much.
- Things get very interesting with the Kindle DX. The question is whether the screen size will be enough.
- The addition of AT&T sponsored 3G wireless is the big new feature. If AT&T doesn’t mess it up, this will be a huge factor once the Daily Edition releases.
- The addition of the Library Finder is another big feature.
Make no sense for a company selling ebooks to add Library access.
Wouldn’t be surprised to see the Main Stream Bloggers fall in love with the Daily Edition and the Touch Edition given their Kindle hate. The Engadget people were already talking about how the Daily Edition looked pretty slick - based off of a blank screen non-working prototype.
Filed under: sony reader | Tagged: sony reader, sony reader 900, sony reader daily edition
On the contrary, I would considering switching for increased library access.
[...] is an excerpt from the Sony Reader PRS-900 Daily Edition – 7″, 3G wireless, Library eBooks post [...]
My God! I hope the screen is like that horrible PRS-600/700. I wonder which Sony engineer and exec got fired for putting in that touchscreen that made the reader unreadable.
C’mon Sony!! You made a great product, the PRS-505.
Your touchscreen layer that you put over the screen that made it cloudy and hazy is horrible!! OFF with it!!
Don’t do touch screen unless you got something way better!!
Let’s hope that the prs-900 has a better contrast than the prs-700. I’m really pissed off that i paid so much for that. the prs-505 was sooooo much better to read. how could Sony even have released the prs-700, knowing that the reading quality was so bad. I agree with Stefan, and hope that the Sony engineer got fired for putting in that touchscreen that made the reader unreadable.
I agree. PRS-505 is really handy tho it crashes sometimes. I have 505 in my purse all the time, but I am not gonna buy any more Sony ebook readers unless they changed the stupid “save all the unessacery reading record into one HUGE cache file” design.
Why did they discontinue the 505
((((, bastards!
“Doesn’t really compare with the Kindle 2 as $100 extra for the solitary benefit of the touchscreen is too much.”
Are you kidding? 100 dollars extra for: touch screen, bigger screen, landscape mode, pdf support, epub support….The touch screen alone is worth it.
sure some of those just come with being a Sony ereader. But for 100 dollars it a no brainer. I have boycotted Sony for the last decade after a few rip offs. I started looking at the Kindle, but it has far too many failures (no touch, no SD card, pay for file changes…not to mention when I first handled one I thought it was broken whenever I turned the page). I might actually have to break my boycott if Kindle 3 doesnt address any of Kindle 2s and Amazons SERIOUS problems.
So when is Sony going to release the “900″ for sale? I purchased it for a Christmas gift, and as far as I can tell it still isn’t in the stores or being shipped from the factory.
Janell, not sure of that. I’d heard that Sony were promising to deliver it by Christmas. What date did you order it on?
As a proud owner of a PRS-505 and someone thinking very seriously about an upgrade to the 700, this genuinely breaks my heart. Glare on a device intended to accommodate the human eye for hours on end as it sweeps across the viewable field in an attempt to resolve tiny characters? Unreal. Reminds me, to a large extent, of a certain non-matte-screen-able laptop…