New Gadget: Sony eBook Reader PRS-505S

Often I need to carry around large reference books for work which means lugging around 600 pages of SharePoint information in my backpack every day. I’ve been wanting to try out an eBook reader for a while so started to look around the web for the best one.

I came across the Sony PRS-505S and read some good reviews on it, so decided to take the plunge and order one. I eventually ordered from the Waterstones online store which had the best price at £194.

The device turned up two days later and I must say first impressions were good, it was stylish, lightweight and felt solid. I installed the Sony Library application which incidentally is a Windows only application and there is no support for Mac as far as I know. Not a problem I just installed it on my Vista VM and headed over to www.ebooks.com.

I am currently studying for a SharePoint MCTS exam so wanted to download the study guide as an eBook and www.ebooks.com had the book for $49.99. Currently I think eBooks are quite expensive and for these devices to take off they need to come down in price quite a bit I think, when they do I think this is definitely the mainstream future for reading books.

The Sony Reader uses e-ink technology and this makes reading on the device a very pleasurable experience I would go so far as to say even better than reading actual paper. It also takes SD cards and supports SD HC so I stuck in an 8GB card which worked perfectly and give me the potential to store thousands of books.

The device doesn’t have a backlit display so reading in the dark may be a problem but overall I am very pleased and can now leave the big heavy books at home which should help me to avoid back trouble in the future.

My new aluminium MacBook Pro finally arrives

On Tuesday my shiny new MacBook Pro finally turned up and I set about installing and setting up everything I need to begin using it for work and play. Unfortunately I’ve been struck down with the flu for the last few days so getting everything installed and running has taken much longer than it should have, but I seem to be there now.

I thought I would share some photos and my initial thoughts on the MBP and hopefully give people who need to run Windows some piece of mind.

Ok so let’s start with the screen, at first I thought a glass screen would be too reflective but it really isn’t, the LED display is so clear and bright that there are no problems at all. My second reservation was the trackpad and how it would work with Windows under bootcamp. I can safely say that the experience is even better than it was on my previous MacBook, with the addition of Tap to Click and being able to assign a corner of the trackpad for right click it’s just much better than before and a joy to use. I’ve heard some people say that the experience is terrible and scrolling is useless but I don’t find that at all. I had to adjust the scrolling increments from 3 to 1 but that’s it.

I installed Vista Ultimate with no problems at all, all the drivers worked straight away, again people have been reporting that the drivers don’t work etc but they most definitely do. I then set about installing VMWare Fusion 2, I previously used Parallels but decided to switch, and I’m glad I did because VMWare seems to be a much smoother and faster experience than Parallels, also I find Unity a much better experience than Coherence.

Below is a photo of Vista’s experience index on the following spec:

• 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 duo
• 320GB Serial ATA 7200 RPM
• 4GB 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM
• NVIDIA GeForce 9400M + 9600M GT with 512MB.

And here are some photos of the machine itself:

All in all the MacBook Pro is an excellent piece of kit and I have no regrets at the moment in spending just under 2K on the machine.