Sony PRS-700 Digital Reader Pairs e-Ink with Touchscreen for Gesture Control

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Following on from the news of Astak’s new Mentor EZ Reader, Sony have taken the wraps off their latest Reader, the ‘next-generation’ Sony PRS-700, which is one of the first (e-Book) Readers to bring together e-Ink technology with a touchscreen display interface allowing for fingertip based gesture control – facilitating the turning of pages with the mere swipe of a fingertip across the screen – which, Sony understandably claim, brings a more natural feel to the PRS-700 than is offered by other readers.

Featuring a 6” touchscreen display that comes with a virtual keyboard (‘for quick annotation or search’), Sony’s PRS-700 Digital Reader offers high contrast 8-Level Gray Scale, 180 degree viewing and – apart from claiming to be the first digital reader with an integrated LED reading light – boasts BBeB Book (Marlin – DRM Text), JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP and MP3 and AAC file format compatibility as well as support for BBeB, ePub, TXT, RTF, Adobe PDF and MS Word formats whilst battery life is purported to last for the equivalent of 7500 continuous pages or, as Sony also puts it, ‘up to two weeks of reading’ (though I’d be particularly impressed if that level of endurance extended to my wife’s voracious reading habits).

Due to begin shipping as of November, the Sony PRS-700 Digital Reader, which comes complete with an integrated Memory Stick Due and SD memory card reader, will retail for around the $400 price point (which, incidentally, includes a bundled outer cover).

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