Sony PRS-700 Touchscreen Reader

[BrunoApple94]

This eBook can be used as a normal PDA on which to take notes, write or draw as if on a normal sheet of paper? I do not care to use it to read books, but as "electronic agenda"? Thanks for your reply!

[Halbmond]

eInk is a bit slow so the display might lag a bit behind the touchscreen but aside from that it should be great for notes. I heard that syncing the notes to your PC isn't very easy, though, and there is no handwriting recognition.

[johnmonk66]

holds 300 books on internal drive? that is 1200 less than the kindle

\and no daily newspapers?

[Deddinsyde]

Colour screen will be next.

[thibaulthalpern]

What's up with the emo hairdo?

[dragonbone5000]

Wonderful product. The future has arrived!  Nice review, thanks! It helped me decide between the PRS-700 and the PRS-505. I decided on the 700 and it's arriving today!!!

[maxerwin]

I want to read my book, not touch everything on the page.

this looks like it would make reading a MORE difficult task

[muskndusk]

This is turning into a word processor. The beauty of an ereader is that it is dedicated to allow the reading of ebooks, not editing speeches!

And think of all the grimy marks on the screen from sweaty fingers.

[Usethebanana]

You have to see further than just reading Moby Dick on an E-reader. When reading technical datasheets, courses, tutorials, etc... basically stuff that you are trying to learn, it is very handy if you could make sidenotes/comments or highlight passages. Right now, you can do this on PC but that doesn't read very comfortable, and printing everything just to be able to make sidenotes is wasteful and inefficient as well. An E-reader that supports comments is the middleway.

[muskndusk]

You can make side notes in Word by using the comments feature.

[Usethebanana]

Well Duh, Of course you can, but Word runs on a computer which weighs a ton compared to an E-reader, it's much less enjoyable for reading, you can't rotate the screen (reading documents in widescreen is not really efficient) and your battery will run flat in 3 to 4 hours average. And it's a lot more durable/shockproof than a laptop. You can easily pop up on of these out of your bag on the train or something, a laptop requires table and the danger of somebody knocking it over and destroying it.

[Usethebanana]

In short, an E-reader with commenting possibilities is a 99% replacement of an actual book. Using a laptop for the same purpose is completely over the top. It's like using a 16-wheel truck to drive to work.

Stop thinking in boxes. Following you way of thinking, a cellphone should just make phonecalls, no sms, no calendar, no reminders, no phonebook, no notes... nothing, just calling. It's better to have the extra features and not using them if you don't want to, than the other way around.

[thibaulthalpern]

I agree. If one buys an ereader to read grocery store trash novels, then annotations is usually not needed. But, some of us are hoping ereaders would evolve with better annotation techniques. I'm a sociologist/anthropologist and a lot of my journal articles can now be found in PDF format. It would be great if i could annotate these files.

[ChelCBellC]

This capability is exactly that I'm looking for. My son will be reading many of the public domain books for home school, and now I can type instructions right into the text for him. For school - home or college, the ability to make notes is extremely valuable.

[thibaulthalpern]

I don't agree. When I read a regular book, I always (ALWAYS) annotate it, mark it, underline, etc. Ever heard of marginalia? I do that too. What a lot of ereaders lack is a good way to annotate text.

[johnwhiteway]

In the long run, obviously more functionalities will be added in to the e-reader, and making notes just one of them. I mean, the only reason that they didnot make this into a PDA is that the refreshing rate of it is too slow

[muskndusk]

For those getting so wound up about this, I did my degree in Literature where note taking was a must. However, I did this not in the book but paper with the page number. Only possible quotes would be underlined. I always hated defacing books. Uni library books couldn't be marked without fear of a fine, so NOTETAKING was an academic art back then.

[Blinkwing]

just a rip off of the iphone!