Overview

The Sony Reader PRS-T1 Wi-Fi is a light and thin ebook reader that doesn't quite measure up to the competition. If the only two specifications you care about are the weight (167 grams) or the thickness (9.5mm) then this might be your best option. However, if you care about an accessible interface, extra features beyond the basic book store, and a reasonable (slightly higher) price, the Kindle 4 is a better bet.

Available in red, black, or white, the Reader is a stylish and svelte ebook reader that felt comfortable during several long ebook reading sessions. You can borrow books from your local library, download free Google Books selections (including many Dickens classics), and play music files.

The direct competitor is the Amazon Kindle 4, which costs £89. That reader, at 170 grams, weighs about the same. Both devices have a similar 167ppi 16-level greyscale screen. The one slight difference is that the Kindle has about 2GB of space for books; the Reader has only 1.3GB.

The Sony Reader presents most UI options clearly – there are buttons to find your downloaded books, access the newspaper portal, and browse a Web site. The unfortunate downside to the E-Ink Pearl screen technology is that the Reader tends to flicker too much – about the same as the Kindle 4, but not nearly as much as the upcoming Kindle Touch (which has no UK release date confirmed yet).

While Amazon has done an excellent job of linking your book reading to your book buying, there is a similar streamlined approach with the Reader, but it's a bit less useable. You can search for books easily and buy them on the device.

There's a logical flow for book ownership. For example, the Sony Reader for PC or Mac software runs as a desktop app where you can also buy and read books. (Sorry, Linux users are out of luck.) There's an Android app, and a reader app for Sony tablets. There's no iPhone or iPad app for Sony books, and for the desktop you have to use the app since there is no Web version.

The Reader has a few interesting UI features. One is that you can hold down on any word to see a dictionary look-up, and the device supports 12 languages. As a touch reader, you can also swipe to the left or right to turn pages, and pinch to zoom in on a Web page or newspaper article.

Sony offers about 2 million books in their ebook store, and we found most best-sellers. Some titles, like the recent Steve Jobs bio, were the same price in the Sony store as the Kindle store. However, some ebooks, like Inheritance by Christopher Paolini, were conspicuously missing from the Sony store.

The Sony Reader is exceptionally light, and the basic book reading options are powerful enough. The extra features were a bit wonky, and the screen flicker became a serious problem during our testing. For £129, the Sony Reader PRS-T1 is a good buy if you prefer a light and thin dedicated ebook reader. That's still £40 more than the Kindle 4, so the Reader has some stiff competition in the ebook market.

In the box, Sony provides a USB cable and a stylus pen

Performance

Sony does not specifically state which processor is used in the Reader, but our guess is that it's a low-power 800Mhz processor that is designed more for flipping through pages of text than graphics. There's a weird pause when you flip to a new page in the browser (even on a 12Mbps connection), and you'll notice quite a bit of screen flicker even for simple tastes like logging into the Sony ebook store.

Modern ebooks like the Sony Reader offer features well beyond ebook reading. The Reader lets you load up music on its paltry 1.3GB of internal storage. (You can add an microSD card up to 32GB.) You can download magazines and newspapers, browse the Web, and even check out ePub books from your local library. The unfortunate reality is that most of these features do not work nearly as smoothly as they do on a tablet, and the screen is not suited for anything but books.

The Reader provides only 16 levels of grey at 600 x 800 pixels. The screen measures six inches, and the device fits comfortably in one hand. It's so extremely light that it feels more like holding a smartphone than an ebook reader. A dull black shell and a light grey screen fade into the background as you read – the non-descript styling is a selling point for those who want to get lost in Crichton-land.

There are five buttons below the screen for forward and back, home, return, and menu. Icons along the top of the screen show any current downloads on the left, wireless signal strength (the Reader connects over Wi-Fi only, not 3G) and the battery level or whether you are charging. The Reader lasts for about one month on a charge, but that stat erodes quickly if you play music while you read.

Oddly, Sony includes a stylus pen you can use for more accurate typing, and there's a large clip you can use to attach the pen…to something, but not the Reader itself.

Like every other recent ebook reader, the Sony Reader uses E-Ink Pearl second-gen screen technology, aka the one distinguishing characteristic for readers like the Amazon Kindle 4 and the Barnes & Noble Nook compared to modern tablets like the Apple iPad 2. You buy an ereader if you only want to read books; you buy a tablet if you want to read books and do just about anything else.

Verdict

The two stand-out specs on the Sony Reader are the light weight and the thin design. As a sleek ebook reader, the Reader stands its own against the Kindle 4 just fine. However, many of the extra features for borrowing books from the library, loading Google Books, and browsing the Web are hard to use. They pale in comparison with the quick touch access of any Android tablet.

Screen flicker became such a problem that we decided to avoid some features after testing them out. For example, at TechRadar.com, we wanted to check a review but the images tended to flicker.

We played music files in the background, but worried that we were chewing up battery power too fast. You can load pictures on the Reader, and we did, but the greyscale screen was not well suited to photos. As an image loaded, the screen would flicker in and out – hampering the overall experience.

The Sony Reader also supports music playback, but there are no external speakers, so you have to use a headphone or connect the device to external speakers. The processor should have been fast enough for basic Web browsing, reading books, and viewing photos but the screen tech caused too much flicker to make those features seem like they were working fast and made them less useable.

We liked

Entry-level ebook readers like the Sony Reader provide one basic function: reading books. As such, this light and thin model is well suited to book lovers. The Reader is just a hair lighter than the Amazon Kindle 4.

The Wi-Fi connection stayed consistent and worked properly. We had no trouble ordering and downloading books, and the Web sites we visited generaly appeared quickly (even if the photos flickered annoying). The headphone jack worked well for listening to music.

There's a microSD slot you can use for adding microSD cards up to 32GB each. The Reader lets you load PDF files, music, and photos but won't play video files. The device lasts for a month on one charge; buttons below the screen were easy to use. The device feels durable and looks stylish.

We disliked

The E-Ink Pearl technology is superb for reading books and long battery life, but on the Sony Reader the screen flickered more than we would like. When there are options like the Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9, with a tremendously clear and bright color screen, the Reader's flicker becomes even more of a negative.

The UI for the Reader is clear enough, but the extra features are hampered by screen flicker. Sure, you can call up a Web site easily on the browser, or check out books from a local library, but when the screen flicks to black after every click, you start to prefer an Android tablet quickly.

At times, the Sony Reader did not appear to be registering some finger presses; in reality, typing worked fine and was accurate, but there are no haptics to give a sensation of touch, and we at least felt the screen input felt imprecise even as we learned to trust that the touches were registering.

To read books on your PC, you have to download and install a desktop app – there is no Web app. The long-lasting battery life is great, but the charge does not last as long if you play music files. There is no 3G connection for impulse purchases when you are not near a Wi-Fi hotspot.

Verdict

The Sony Reader PRS-T1 is about the same weight as the much cheaper Amazon Kindle. We found that, for basic book reading, the Reader is a good option because the only time you'll notice any screen flicker is when you access the extra features such as the web browser

Pricing of ebooks matches what you will find in the Kindle store.

But if you venture away from basic reading, the Amazon Kindle is a better choice - it is just as light, cheaper, and offers a wider selection of books. Also, the Kindle offers more storage space for books - about 2GB compared to the Reader's 1.3GB.

Overview

If it's vaguely tablet-shaped, there's a good chance that Elonex makes it: the firm makes 10-inch and 7-inch Android tablets with capacitive touchscreens, cut-price seven-inchers with resistive screens, portable media players, photo frames, weather stations and ebook readers.

In ebooks it makes two kinds of devices: e-ink readers such as the £99 621EB, and LCD ones such as the 705EB. It's the LCD one we're interested in here.

As with previous Elonex devices, you'll be able to pick up the 705EB in Waterstones, and the RRP is £129 - slightly pricey in ebook terms, at £40 more than the View Quest Bookbox and even £20 more than the Kobo eReader Touch, but cheap for a tablet. And to be honest, it's more of a tablet than it is an ebook reader.

The Elonex 705EB looks awfully like a seven-inch tablet, and that's essentially what it is: while Elonex is marketing the device as an ebook reader, it also doubles as an MP3 player, FM radio photo viewer and video player.

A reasonable 4GB of built-in storage is enough for thousands of books, although of course video will eat capacity fairly quickly and you might find the 16GB microSD card slot comes in handy for media.

Where the Elonex 705EB falls down is in its display, which delivers a resolution of 800 x 480. That's a comparatively low pixel density for a seven-inch device, which is unfortunate when reading text is the device's main purpose. It also means that it can't display the advertised 720p video in its full glory. For that, you'll need to connect the 705EB to your TV.

The matte screen means it's better in daylight than glossier models, but the display suffers from poor viewing angles. Taken together, these issues mean it's best considered as a media player that just happens to do ebooks too.

The Elonex 705EB is roughly the same size as the Amazon Kindle 4, pictured here side by side.

Specifications and performance

When it comes to ebook readers, manufacturers tend to fall into two camps. Some start from scratch and ask: "What would make the best ereading experience?", building their devices accordingly; others build multi-purpose gadgets and then go: "Aha! Let's make it do ebooks too!"

There's nothing wrong with either approach, but if you're also building to a tight budget, the latter approach means there's a risk of cutting too many corners. We think that's what's happened here.

On paper, the Elonex 705EB looks just the ticket. A seven-inch tablet-style ereader with HD video support, 4GB of expandable storage, FM radio, support for DRMed ePub books and the ability to reflow PDF files for just £129 looks like a bargain, and it's nice to see devices in more colours than just black or white.

However, stretching an 800 x 480 pixel display over seven diagonal inches means that you end up with a pixel density that's lower than a smartphone, ereader or tablet. Images have noticeable banding and text is noticeably pixelated. We suspect that the lack of small fonts for reading is because they'd give you a headache, and even at larger sizes, the on-screen type is indistinct.

Viewing angles are poor, too – tilt the Elonex 705EB away from you even slightly and items start to disappear.

There are other concerns, too. Where other manufacturers tend to choose either a touchscreen or physical, clickable buttons for navigation, Elonex has gone for flat buttons around the bezel that don't provide any resistance or feedback. Instead, a vibration mechanism rumbles when you press a key.

You can see what it was trying to do, but it doesn't quite work. Luckily, you can turn the vibration off. It'd be nice if the device's user interface had been given a bit of TLC too: it looks like it was put together in Microsoft Paint.

It's not all bad, though. While the screen isn't HD, it can output 720p HD video (AVI, FLV, MKV, MPG, MPEG and VOB) to your TV. The MP3 player supports WAV and MP3 and has an internal speaker for when you don't fancy headphones, the photo viewer can handle JPG, PNG, BMP and GIF images, and the ebook reader supports EPUB, TXT, HTML and PDF.

In the latter case, text-based PDFs reflow to fit the current zoom level, which is handy for PDF ebooks from the likes of Smashwords, although the feature doesn't work with more graphical PDFs such as magazine pages. DRM is handled by the familiar Adobe Digital Editions, although you can simply drag and drop non-DRMed files from your PC or Mac in USB mass storage mode, and there's a text-to-speech mode for TXT files.

Claimed battery life is a reasonable eight hours for reading and 30 hours for music. While Elonex doesn't have a book store as such, it does provide Freebooks, a collection of 1.5 million free ebooks. Don't expect to find the latest Ian Rankin or Lee Child in the catalogue, though, the catalogue is the usual freebie collection of classics and obscurities.

As you've probably guessed, we're not keen on the Elonex 705EB as a dedicated ebook reader: even short reads weren't particularly pleasant.

However, the combination of an anti-glare screen, decent video performance and microSD card support means it's a decent alternative to a portable DVD player for travelling. We can imagine using one to keep a child amused on a long car, boat, train or plane journey - although older children will probably ask why you didn't just buy them an iPod touch.

Verdict

It's a shame that the Elonex 705EB is marketed as an ebook reader, because ebook reading isn't its strong point: it's a capable video player that doubles as an MP3 player and lets you read the odd ebook.

We wouldn't use it for protracted reading sessions, but it may be worth considering as an alternative to a portable DVD player.

We liked

The Elonex 705EB works quite well as a media player, outputting 720p video to your TV and doing a decent job of music, radio and movies. It's reasonably cheap and well suited to bright, colourful images.

We disliked

LCD screens aren't great for ebooks at the best of times, and the Elonex 705EB's screen resolution doesn't really suit the seven-inch form factor. The interface isn't very nice, the fonts are indistinct and the flat buttons are horrible.

Verdict

If you think of the Elonex 705EB as a media player, it's a decent device: the screen is at its best with brightly coloured photos and video, there's a TV out and 4GB of expandable storage isn't bad.

However, as an ebook reader it's less successful. We didn't enjoy the ereading experience on it at all.

Overview

For a while it was looking as if Amazon had the UK ebook market to itself: while rival booksellers offered a range of ebook readers from the likes of Elonex and Sony, nobody offered the soup-to-nuts service of Amazon's Kindle, store and associated apps. Now, though, Amazon UK has a serious rival in the form of WHSmith and its new Canadian friend, Kobo.

Kobo isn't new to the ebook game - it's been doing decent business in the US for a few years now, and its UK ebook store has been open since February 2010 - but its ereaders are new to Britain. There are two models, starting at £89.99 for the Kobo Wireless eReader and rising to £109.99 for the newer touchscreen Kobo eReader Touch.

Given the choice, we'd pay the extra 20 quid - the Kobo eReader Touch makes its sibling look rather old-fashioned, and while it isn't quite a Kindle killer, it comes very close indeed. If you don't like Amazon's power, can't wait for the Kindle Touch to be offered over here or just think the redesigned Kindle mings, the Kobo eReader Touch is a genuine alternative to Amazon's offering.

It's an alternative that in some respects beats Amazon's device at its own game. It looks better, has a nicer user interface and has a better range of typefaces, and unlike Amazon's touch-screen device you can actually buy one in British shops.

Ebook readers aren't just about technology, of course - they're about content too, because nobody's going to shell out for an ebook reader they can't get any books for. Kobo's got that covered, too: while we found a few gaps in the catalogue, the big hitters were present, correct and no more expensive than Amazon.

Specifications and performance

The Kobo eReader Touch has a lot in common with the latest generation of Amazon Kindles. Like the Kindle Touch, the Kobo eReader Touch is built around a six-inch e-ink Pearl display offering month-long battery life. Like the Kindle Touch, there's a touchscreen instead of a physical keyboard and page forward/back buttons. And again like the Kindle Touch, its bezel is just thin enough to make it awkward to hold one-handed.

There are other similarities. Both the Kindle Touch and the Kobo eReader Touch have screens that don't fully refresh with each page turn. That speeds up the time between pages, but it can make the screen look grubby between full refreshes.

If that annoys you, the Kobo's settings enable you to increase the frequency of full page refreshes. The default is every sixth page turn, but you can make it happen with every page if you wish.

There are some important differences, however. The Kobo eReader Touch's 2GB of storage - of which around 1GB can be used for storing media - can be expanded via its microSD card slot, its user interface is much prettier than Amazon's rather functional effort, and you've got more control over the way text appears on the screen. There are seven fonts and 17 font sizes to choose from, although at smaller sizes some of the fonts are a little bit thin-looking to our eyes.

On the plus side, you can switch off text justification to keep the right margins ragged - something that makes reading less of a strain. You can also view PDFs without having to convert them first, although the zooming and panning you need to do inside PDFs may annoy some, and there's a fun sketchbook for scribbling and saving quick notes or drawings.

The Kobo eReader Touch looks and feels more expensive than it is, with a choice of black and white models boasting quilted backs in black, lilac, blue and silver.

The interface is much prettier than Amazon's more functional effort, and the screen in sleep mode displays the cover of the book you're currently reading, which is a nice touch. You can turn this off if you'd rather not broadcast your reading choices to all and sundry.

Where some ereaders are tied to single stores, the Kobo eReader Touch is more promiscuous. It supports ePub books, including Adobe DRMed ones, as well as TXT, HTML, RTF, MOBI, PDF and the comic book formats CBZ and CBR. That means you should be able to acquire books from most non-Amazon retailers (Amazon books are in its own proprietary format).

There's also a collection of apps for iOS, Android, BlackBerry and Palm that enable you to sync titles and bookmarks between devices, and the Android and iOS apps support Reading Life, Kobo's awards scheme for readers. Reading Life comes in two forms: a set of statistics so you can see how much time you've spent reading, how much of your library you've still got to read and so on, and a set of Xbox Live-style awards for completing tasks such as finishing your first book.

It's all very impressive, but of course with ereaders content really is king. Does Kobo have the books you want? The answer is largely yes: when we searched for current bestsellers - the new Ian Rankin, Chris Brookmyre and Mark Billingham thrillers, the Steve Jobs biography and so on - the Kobo store had them at the same prices as Amazon's Kindle store.

If your tastes are less mainstream, however, it's worth checking whether Kobo has your favourites: for example, books by US humourist PJ O'Rourke weren't available in the UK store, and some of our searches for less well-known fiction writers were unsuccessful.

Verdict

The Kobo eReader Touch looks and feels more expensive than it is, and to our eyes it's cooler than the new Amazon Kindles. The online catalogue isn't quite as big as Amazon's, but it's still big. For mainstream fiction and non-fiction reading, the Kobo is well worth a look.

We liked

The Kobo eReader Touch is impressive on multiple fronts: it looks good, it's easy to get the display just-so and there are Kobo editions of pretty much any book you'd expect to find in WHSmith.

We disliked

Maybe we're just fat fingered, but we found the bezel too thin for comfortable one-handed operation. Some of the display fonts are rather insubstantial, and the lack of 3G may be a deal-breaker for some.

Final verdict

The Kobo eReader Touch is an interesting and desirable alternative to the Kindle Touch - and unlike Amazon's touchscreen ereader, you can buy one in Britain. It's much more desirable than the entry-level Kindle, and if you're considering an ereader it should definitely be on your shortlist.

Overview

We're seeing an ideological battle happening in ebook land. On one hand you have the e-ink advocates, who argue that anything but e-ink is hopeless for ebook reading, and that ebook readers should do one thing really, really well. On the other, you've got the LCD fans, who reckon that there's more to life than just books and that having a device that can only handle one kind of media is a bit silly.

View Quest is firmly in the second camp, so its Bookbox is a multimedia device as well as an ebook reader.

At first glance the View Quest Bookbox looks like an oversized smartphone: it's dominated by the screen, there's a bunch of buttons at the bottom and the whole thing slips happily into a reasonably roomy pocket. Its price is similar to an Amazon Kindle or a Kobo Wireless eReader, with an RRP of £79.99.

Above is how it physically compares to an Amazon Kindle.

However, it's much thicker than an ereader or smartphone - at 16mm it's a bit of a porker. And the shiny screen means that, unlike e-ink devices, the View Quest Bookbox isn't something you'd take to the beach - like all backlit LCDs, its screen is useless in direct sunlight.

That doesn't mean you should write the View Quest Bookbox off, however. We're in media player territory here, where devices are designed not for poolside reading but for the odd ebook at bedtime and watching blockbusters on the bus. That five-inch backlit LCD isn't ideal for protracted periods of reading, but it's crisp, clear and really rather good for video.

Factor in support for a surprisingly large range of file formats and the View Quest Bookbox starts to look much more interesting and attractive.

The View Quest Bookbox, then, is a kind of cross between Amazon's latest Kindle and Apple's latest iPod touch: more functional than the former and bigger and cheaper than the latter.

We wouldn't recommend it for bookworms, but that doesn't mean we wouldn't recommend it at all.

Specifications and performance

The View Quest Bookbox is powered by an ARM 9 processor running at 400MHz, and its 2,000mAH battery promises six hours of ebook reading or 20 hours of music. There's 2GB of onboard storage, and the integral MMC/SD/SDHC slot supports cards with up to 32GB capacity.

The five-inch screen delivers 800 x 600 resolution, which is adequate for a five-incher, and the user interface is pretty horrible to look at but simple enough to use.

You wouldn't expect a touchscreen at this price, and you don't get one. Don't expect Apple-style engineering either. The View Quest Bookbox is perfectly well screwed together but looks and feels plasticky, and we found that some button presses caused ripples on the screen. Maybe we're just incredibly strong - although we doubt it.

The View Quest Bookbox looks and feels like a slightly overgrown smartphone. The front is dominated by the screen with a handful of buttons - left, right, menu, zoom, return, play/pause and a d-pad - at the bottom, and the slightly curved, rubberised plastic back won't slip around on tables or in your hands.

There are forward and back buttons on the right-hand side of the case - sorry sinistrals, but there isn't a matching set on the left - and the familiar smartphone-style positioning of the power button at the top of the screen and headphone socket and micro USB port at the bottom. Unlike rival devices, there aren't any built-in speakers.

The screen itself is a clear, bright 800 x 480 display with fairly narrow viewing angles: if you don't hold it just-so, the image disappears.

As an ebook reader, the View Quest Bookbox is reasonably good. Its processor is hardly a screamer, but that doesn't matter when all you're doing is turning pages. Provided you hold the display at the right angle, text is reasonably clear - think typical smartphone screen - and it's easy to adjust text sizes, colours and brightness or to add or find a bookmark.

The View Quest Bookbox supports ePub, PDF, TXT, FB2, PDB and HTML files, and it supports Adobe DRM so you can buy the latest Terry Pratchett from Waterstones or WHSmith on your PC or Mac and transfer it to the View Quest Bookbox.

There's more to the View Quest Bookbox than books, though. It has a built-in MP3 player and photo viewer and its video player will happily handle DivX, AVI, MP4 and MKV files.

You won't fit many movies into the 2GB of onboard storage, but memory cards are cheap enough that that shouldn't be too big an issue.

We expected the View Quest Bookbox's fairly low-spec processor to choke on faster clips, but playback was seamless and the battery delivered three to four hours of viewing before running out of puff.

Viewing angles remained problematic, though: this isn't a device that several people can watch simultaneously.

We can't help thinking that the ideal users of the View Quest Bookbox are children. There's no Wi-Fi or 3G so there's no danger of them accessing any video or books you haven't approved, and at £79 the View Quest Bookbox isn't so expensive that you'll need to cover it in bubble wrap to protect it from jammy fingers.

Verdict

As a portable video player, the View Quest Bookbox isn't bad, but its screen isn't the best, the UI's pretty horrible and it looks embarrassingly old-fashioned next to an Amazon Kindle or iPod touch. It'd be a great way to keep a child quiet through an EasyJet flight, but we wouldn't buy one for ourselves.

We liked

The View Quest Bookbox is reasonably portable, fairly rugged and cheap enough that you won't care if the kids try to eat it or put it in the toaster. Video playback and support is superb, and the price tag is very low.

We disliked

We're not fans of LCD screens for ebook reading - viewing angles are poor - and the View Quest Bookbox isn't the prettiest or fastest ebook reader around.

Final verdict

The View Quest Bookbox is caught between a rock and a hard place. The rock is e-ink, which delivers a better reading experience than any LCD screen can offer, and the hard place is the iPod touch, whose retina display makes it a better ebook reader and whose apps do more than the View Quest Bookbox could possibly dream of.

Overview

The Amazon Kindle 4 (aka Kindle 4th Gen, Kindle Touchless or just plain Kindle) was announced as a sidenote to the colour Kindle Fire and touch-enabled Kindle Touch. But in many ways it was the most significant of the three, because of its extraordinary price.

The UK remains the poor cousin to the US in the world of dedicated ebook readers. While many are on the market, to be a real success they need the vertical integration of being linked with a book seller, both for usability and the subsidy to the initial purchase price.

A stand-alone reader needs to make a profit for the manufacturer from the retail price alone, while a book seller device can make its money from the books and so can afford to be priced cheaply. And Amazon as the biggest book store can subsidise its ereaders the most.

As a result we really only have Amazon's Kindle, missing out on other book seller-tied devices such as the Nook and Kobo.

Worse, we currently only have one of the new generation of Kindles, the others being restricted to the US (presumably for supply reasons). And to add salt to the trans-Atlantic wound, our new Kindle costs £89 compared to $79 (around £50) in the States.

But we do at least have one of the next-gen Amazon Kindles, and it's still very, very cheap. So how does it stack up?

Well, unlike the Kindle Touch and Kindle Fire, the plain Kindle is basically a cut down and repackaged version of last year's Kindle 3 - now renamed the Kindle Keyboard - rather than one with new technologies and features added.

That's not necessarily a bad thing, because the Kindle Keyboard was the best ebook reader on the market in terms of screen, book choice and price.

If you put the price of the US version out of mind, £89 really is cheap as chips for an ebook reader, especially one as accomplished as this.

As well as opening up ereaders to a new market, when the reader is priced this low you're less worried about taking it into environments where you might think twice about using expensive electronics, such as the bathroom or the beach. While not exactly disposable, it's not £500-worth of iPad to wreck either.

Amazon famously sells more books in Kindle ebook format than in print these days, and this price point is only going to accelerate that trend.

Performance

The key to any ebook reader is the screen, and the new Kindle shares the same 600 x 800, 16 greys E-Ink display as the previous generation Kindle Keyboard, and it remains marvelous.

Its matt screen surface is perfectly legible in the sort of direct sunshine that usually reduces glossy-screened LCD devices to pure glare.

However, it's not backlit, so you'll need the bedside light on at night.

Amazon claims its new Kindle's screen refreshes 10% faster than the last generation, but we couldn't see any obvious improvement.What has changed is the visual way the page changes - no longer does the page flick to all black before redrawing; now only the areas that need to change flicker and redraw, which looks much more elegant.

A full-page refresh happens every few pages. The lack of a full refresh degrades the text quality very slightly over time between refreshes - you can download a software update to return to the old refresh system if you find it noticeable.

The screen is the same, but the packaging is very different. The new Kindle measures just 166mm by 114mm, making it the smallest of the family and some 24mm shorter and 9mm narrower than the Kindle Keyboard, itself a slight device.

Design-wise the single grey and rounded corners are replaced with a tri-tone set of greys with much sharper corners. The plastic on the back has a slightly coated feel to aid grip, but not as rubberised as the Keyboard.

The buttons are simplified. Obviously there's no QWERTY keyboard, and just four buttons flank the central four-way-plus-select rocker. The buttons are Back, Home, Menu and a key to call up the on-screen keyboard. Forward and back ìpaddlesî sit either side of the screen, and on the base a simple power button replaces the slider seen in previous generations.

The net effect is of a reader the size of a very slim paperback volume of poetry, which sits in the palm of one hand - if you have fairly large hands. The reduction in weight to just 170g means you can hold this all day. The page turn buttons are narrower, so you need to hold the new Amazon Kindle slightly differently, but we didn't find this a problem.

One change on the back is the addition of two small metal contact pads, presumably to power accessories such as a light.

Inside the Amazon Kindle, the memory has been reduced from 4GB to 2GB, half of which is available for ebooks. That's still a huge amount of space, especially now you can keep any ebooks you're not currently reading ìin the cloudî on Amazon's servers, and just restore them in seconds. Amazon reckons you can fit 1,400 books on the device, but we didn't buy quite 1,400 books to check this.

Also reduced is the battery capacity, but the device should still last a month on a single charge. No charger is included with the Amazon Kindle, just a USB cable. But because the Kindle uses a micro USB connector, you probably have half a dozen compatible chargers lying around already.

The Amazon Kindle is Wi-Fi only - if you want 3G internet connectivity you'll need to buy the £149 Kindle Keyboard, or wait for the Kindle Touch to make it to the UK. 3G is handy, but for most users we suspect Wi-Fi access will be perfectly sufficient. The Wi-Fi chip is one area that has had an upgrade, with access via 802.11n as well as a and g wireless internet.

To keep costs and size down, all of the audio features on the Kindle Keyboard have been removed, so there are no speakers or headphone jacks, there's no read aloud feature and there's no MP3 player.

Most other software features of the Amazon Kindle are the same as the other members of the family, but the lack of a hard keyboard means that only the most masochistic of users will use some of them, such as adding annotations.

Similarly, the experimental web browser is still there, but while slow screen refresh and 16-greys display made it unpleasant to use on the Keyboard, with URLs taking minutes to type it's virtually unusable here. You might take the time to laboriously set up a webmail account, we suppose.

The on-screen keyboard isn't great, the lack of buttons for Shift or to change to numeric input and the tiny pad making tapping out even usernames and passwords a real effort. Fortunately, aside from searching the Kindle Store, once the device is set up you won't have much need for it.

The Amazon Kindle comes with version 4.0 of its operating system - the Kindle Keyboard runs 3.3. There are few differences, but one that the lack of a physical keyboard enables is the ability to switch languages, which could be useful for multi-lingual readers. A new set of screen savers are added, which are slightly more contemporary in feel.

As with previous versions, you can send your own PDF and text documents to the Amazon Kindle via email or a direct USB connection. There's still no direct support for the ePub format, though, requiring another conversion stage. This is starting to look a little churlish on Amazon's part. Surely it should encourage users of ePub-based ereaders to convert?

A significant feature, not just of this device but of the whole Kindle service, is its ability to share ebooks between readers running on pretty much every technology there is - PC, Mac, iPad, iPhone, Android, BlackBerry - you can read the same books, and it remembers where you got up to on another device. This means you always have your books with you, even when the Kindle itself is at home.

Verdict

With the new Kindle, Amazon has significantly raised the value for money bar for ereaders. Amazon offers the best selection of ebooks, and with its fourth generation devices it offers as good an ereader as you'll find anywhere.

Now it's added an entry-level price that will have stand-alone ereader manufacturers crying into their beers. And it's done so without significantly detracting from the experience. Indeed, in sheer size terms, the new Amazon Kindle is the best yet.

We liked

The Amazon Kindle is small and light, has access to the largest selection of ebooks, and has thoroughly road-tested software in its fourth iteration. It's screen is state of the art and a pleasure to read on, and of course it now costs just £89.

We disliked

The lack of a physical keyboard means some of the software features are pretty much unusable, and there's no 3G internet option.

The Americans get it £40 cheaper than British consumers.

Verdict

If you want a straightforward dedicated ereader, it's hard to see past the neat form factor, superb book choice, amazing screen and eye-catching price of the Amazon Kindle.

If you want more features, you might want to wait for the Kindle Touch or Kindle Fire, but for most people the decision is very simple - buy the Kindle.

Overview

The Amazon Kindle Keyboard has been the most hyped eBook reader of the year.

With a hugely competitive £109 price-tag, decent specs and the backing of the UK's biggest book etailer, even before launch it's made many of the other eBook readers out there look outclassed and hugely overpriced.

But does it live up to expectations?

The Amazon Kindle looked for a while as though it was going to be lost in the tablet hype-fest as a hopelessly under-specced footnote on the path to iPad supremacy.

But with the new Kindle Keyboard, Amazon has absolutely shown there's plenty of life in the dedicated eBook reader yet.

It's the first Kindle to be properly supported in the UK from its release date, including having a dedicated UK store (the Kindle 2 was eventually available here using the US store to make purchases).

This Kindle Keyboard has a bigger battery with 14 per cent more capacity (enough to last a month with W-Fi turned off), an extra 1GB of memory (4GB in total) and is noticeably smaller and lighter than its predecessors.

It's available is a Wi-Fi only edition, or one with added 3G support. The latter version comes in a choice of colours – white or dark grey – with the wi-fi version it's grey only.

In practice, the improvements in the Kindle specifications don't make a lot of odds.

The battery life, already long, is now a claimed one month (sorry, deadlines meant we couldn't put that to the test!).

Storage capacity was already thousands of books, and is now a claimed 3,500 - and with the 3G and Wi-Fi network connectivity enabling you to download from the web at will, capacity is effectively infinite.

But there is one change which does make a big difference – the new display.

Amazon claims a 50 per cent increase in contrast ratio, and it's certainly a big improvement - certainly one of the best eReader screens we've seen.

More than one of the people we showed it to assumed that it still had a fake display sticker on it, like the ones mobile phones have in shops, and were amazed that it was actually on and that this was the real display.

The display is sharp and the text is a deep black, making it very easy to read. Far easier, in fact, than on touchscreen tablets like the iPad.

The background is not pure white, more of an Etch-A-Sketch grey, and if you look carefully you can see ghost text from the previous screen. This is a side effect of the ultra-low-power E Ink Pearl electronic paper display which wipes and redisplays once, rather than continuously refreshing like a conventional LCD panel.

In practice the effect is no more noticeable than the show-through you get form a real book. The 800x600 display might be expected to exhibit jaggies, especially as there is no anti-aliasing, but the chosen fonts work well.

There is a definite pause when you transition pages, and the screen flicks black – no wow-factor animated page turns here - with a screen refresh time of around a quarter second per frame. It jars a bit at first but you rapidly don't notice it.

Reading with the new Kindle

Unlike the iPad and the plethora of Android based tablets, the Kindle Keyboard is designed to do one thing, and to do it well – display books. It has some other bolted-on functions, but they are very much secondary, and we'll come to them later.

It's as a book reader that the Kindle Keyboard excels. It's form factor is perfect – about the height and width size a small paperback, but much thinner (unless you read a lot of poetry). It's weight, at 240g, is low enough to hold comfortably in one hand for as long as you like.

New Amazon Kindle 3 next to a regular paperback

It weighs roughly two thirds less than an iPad, and 140g less than a Samsung Galaxy Tab.

Page forward and back controls, duplicated on either side for lefties, are ergonomically perfect once you've got used to the bottom-top buttons rather than right-left for forward and back.

Compared to using the Kindle app on the iPad, it's much easier to turn pages and of course you don't get accidental page turns from touching the screen by mistake.

Performance

There are a number of ways to get books onto the new Kindle 3. The most obvious is to buy them from the Kindle store, which is now a dedicated UK operation.

Kindle definitely has the edge over Apple's rival iBook Store in both pricing and range, but both still have some way to go.

If you're expecting eBooks to offer major savings over paper, you may be disappointed. Typical savings on paperbacks are a few pence, although new release hardbacks are better – the new Terry Pratchett for example is £3.64 cheaper on Kindle than Amazon proper, but his most recent paperback release is only a 20p saving.

The case is an option extra

Apple's store doesn't have any Pratchett books at all.

Downloading a book takes a few seconds over 3G or wi-fi, not much longer with GPRS, and you can read your Kindle-bought books on your PC or Mac, on an iPhone, iPad or an Android device as well as the Kindle itself.

It even syncs up your latest reading position so if you don't have your Kindle on you, you can read a few pages on your HTC Desire and on getting home your Kindle will have moved on to the right place.

Alternatively, if you have documents in one of the eBook formats, you can either load them directly via the Kindle's USB connection (it appears on your PC or Mac like a memory card) or if required convert them to a supported format using 3rd party software like Calibre.

You can load PDF documents into the Kindle too. There's also a system for converting Word documents – you e-mail the documents to a special address and the docs are converted and uploaded to your Kindle automatically; there is a small fee for that.

Wi-Fi or 3G version?

We've reviewed the 3G version here, but unless your planning is so poor, or your reading so fast, that you find yourself caught short of a book to read between leaving the house and arriving at work, we'd question whether it was worth the £40 extra over the Wi-Fi only edition.

Naturally you can change the font and text size (if the book lets you; some have their own embedded fonts), and you can switch to a sideways orientation if you like.

The optional case has a light for reading in the dark

The Kindle has a text-to-speech function, but we wouldn't recommend it as it trips up over sentence endings. Margin scribblers will be happy with the ability to add highlights and notes – and even share them over the usual social networks.

You can view the most highlighted parts of the book you are reading, should the fancy take you - the 21st Century version of looking for the most thumbed sections of a James Herbert novel.

In use, the reading experience is flawless. The display is of course a passive one, so no reading in the dark (unless you buy the £50 case with a built in reading light), but it's much easier on the eyes so you won't get an "iPad migraine".

It should be great in direct sunshine too, although the British weather prevented a scientific test of that. It's matt screen certainly prevents annoying reflections. Long term reading on the Kindle is a joy.

Interface

Away from reading, the device's monomania does have a knock on effect on its usability.

Selecting a book and navigating the device's menus is done with a square four-way selector with a central OK button, along with dedicated Home, Menu and Back buttons.

It works, but it feels very old fashioned and clunky. That's not helped by the monochrome display's inability to highlight options – you have to look for the underline.

There is a QWERTY keyboard with tiny buttons and an awkward Shift key. It will get very little use for most people, and we wonder if the area at the bottom could have been better used for a more sophisticated menu control system.

The little extras

Probably stung by the multi-function loveliness of the iPad, Amazon has added some extra features to the Kindle 3, labelling them "Experimental" in the hope we won't be too harsh about them.

There is a web browser; it's based on WebKit so is compatible with most sites but as you can imagine browsing on a 16-greyscale 800 x 600 display which can't cope with animation and no touchpad is not anyone's idea of a nice experience.

You could use it in emergencies. It does have a nice Article View, which strips out all but the body text of a page and presents as straight text, making the most of the Kindle's advantages, but unfortunately you still have to use the normal view to navigate to the page you want to read.

The new Kindle also allows playback of MP3s while you read. That could be a very nice feature, but as the only controls are pause and skip forward, there's no track selector or even an indicator of what's playing, you'd have to say it's not really usable.

Remarkably the thing they could so easily have added to a device with a network connection, a great screen for text and a QWERTY keyboard – e-mail – isn't there even as an experimental feature.

Verdict

The Amazon Kindle Keyboard is optimised for reading books above any other function, as a result it does a superb job. The E Ink display is gorgeous and incredibly easy to read. It's size and weight make it perfect as a portable eReader. And it's finally out at a breakthrough price £109 for Wi-Fi only and £149 for 3G.

There's a lot of attention being given to eBooks thanks to the explosion in multi-function tablets, but it's still the case that jack of all trades is master of none, and for reading, the Amazon Kindle is by far the best experience.

Given its price and the range of books now available, the time of the eReader is finally here, and the Kindle 3 is showing Apple the way.

We liked:

The screen is excellent, the size of the device is ideal and the range of books available is fantastic. The price is excellent compared with rival products.

We disliked:

Books could be cheaper, anything which needs colour doesn't work well, and the keyboard and menu systems are a bit clunky.

Verdict:

Amazon shows that specialising can pay as it beats the tablets at their own game.

Like most LCD-based ebook readers, the Elonex 500B eBook is picking a fight with the wrong products.

On paper, it has several advantages, including full colour and resilience – with its protected screen, you're more likely to forgo an expensive case.

Playing with it in person though, it's simply not a good experience as a mini tablet or a substitute for real books. The standard LCD problems apply here – a very short battery life (six hours promised in this case, compared to the weeks or month offered by e-ink devices), weighing more than it feels like it should, and backlighting/screen reflection issues.

Oddly, the eBook's main problem was at the other end of the spectrum – even at 100 per cent brightness, the screen remained dark and dingy, with a terrible contrast ratio. We were squinting to read text on it, and even at full zoom the screen is simply too small for comfortable reading.

Little comfort issues – like the clicker to switch pages only being found on the right-hand side of the unit – didn't help, especially for the left-handed members of the team.

The UI is slow and clunky, hitting its nadir when it started taking two seconds just to move the selection cursor between the 'Continue reading' and 'Library' sections of its main menu, and several seconds to flip between that and a barely stocked File Manager screen.

E-ink systems at least have an excuse for being sluggish. The technology behind the eBook gives it features like video playback and colour. However, its power feels nowhere near that of the average tablet, and as a dedicated reader it lags far behind the Amazon Kindle.

Samsung Galaxy Player 50 review: Overview

With the Samsung Galaxy Player 50, we seem to finally be seeing a household name come out with major competition to the iPod touch. Now that the Galaxy brand is strong, the time seems right for this Android media player.

Samsung's plan seems simple enough: forget the over-engineering and compete on extra features and price. It's a familiar Android tune, and one that's worked pretty damn well in the smartphone market.

What we have is a touchscreen PMP with Android 2.1, Wi-Fi, micro-USB connectivity, a two-megapixel camera and a built-in microphone. It beats the iPod touch in a couple of key areas, with a built-in GPS chip, removable battery, FM radio and a microSD card slot for adding up to 32GB of additional memory.

There's already 8GB of on-board memory, so all that looks pretty good for £149 – £40 less than the 8GB iPod Touch. There's also a 16GB version for £179.

All of that sounds enticing, but there are a few caveats. The 3.2-inch screen is slightly smaller than the iPod's 3.5 inches, which isn't that big a deal in itself, but the resolution is only 240 x 400 pixels.

While we weren't expecting Samsung to match the glorious 480 x 960 of Apple's Retina display, we were hoping for something more like the 480 x 800 four-inch screen on the Samsung Galaxy S, Samsung Omnia 7 or Google Nexus S.

One other thing those handsets have in common? They're all AMOLED. This isn't.

The screen on the Galaxy Player really looks low-res, too. It's pixelated and text can appear unclear.

The other advantages the iPod has is its front-facing camera and the ability to record video in HD. Spec for spec, are these worth the £30 more that Apple's charging? We'd say yes, primarily for the Retina display, but the microSD expansion and GPS chip mean we'd probably call it even on value for money based purely on the specs.

The Galaxy Player is plastic, and feels light and a little cheap. However, that's not to say it's low quality. It's feels solid in the hand, and the lightly bumped battery cover adds some grip to it.

At 54 x 11 x 105.5mm, it's a fair bit thicker than the iPod Touch, but is smaller in the other two dimensions. At just 84g, the Galaxy Player trounces the iPod when it comes to weight, with the latter coming in 101g.

On the front of the player, underneath the multi-touch screen, are three buttons: Menu, Home and Back. The Home is a physical button, while the others are touch sensitive.

On the device's right side is a lock/on/off key and the microphone, while volume controls are on the left. On the top is the 3.5mm headphone socket and the micro-USB port, which has a little slide-over cover that actually feels pretty solid and reliable.

The removable battery is 1000mAh, which is much smaller than what you'd get on a smartphone. This isn't so much of a problem as there's no cellular radio constantly going here (unless you let the GPS run all the time), so battery life is actually pretty acceptable. Not really any better than its competitors, but not bad by any means.

Samsung Galaxy Player 50 review: Camera samples

Camera samples from the Samsung Galaxy Player 50's two-megapixel camera.

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Panorama mode

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Samsung Galaxy Player 50 review: Video sample

Video sample from the Samsung Galaxy Player 50.

Samsung Galaxy Player 50 review: Verdict

You'll have already seen the score for the Samsung Galaxy Player, so you're probably wondering what's wrong, considering nothing on the previous page was that bad.

Most of the time, at least on the model we tested, the Galaxy Player is unusable. By that, we don't just mean that it's a bit slow or awkward. It spends the majority of its time crashed when you try to launch apps, or even when you just wake it from the lock screen. It's unusable in the sense that you are completely unable to use it.

The most ridiculous thing is that it works fine sometimes. On those occasions, getting around the Android Home screens and menu is exceptionally fast. Opening an app is like a game of Russian Roulette, though.

Will the notifications bar bring everything to a standstill? Will your email inbox simply fail to load? Will the Maps app cause a totally blank screen? Connecting to Wi-Fi can cause it, as can plugging in earphones.

The worst part about these crashes is that they don't fix themselves quickly (as they almost always do on iOS, for example). You're simply left hanging until the task manager finally catches on and gives you the option to force close things. This can take 10 or 15 minutes sometimes, and still isn't guaranteed to get everything back on track.

The Android Market is almost certain to make the device crash whenever opened. What should be the Galaxy Player's major selling point was totally useless. It crashed the operating system nearly every time, and even when it did load, we couldn't install any apps.

We were told there wasn't enough space on the device. Checking the settings told us that there were zero bytes available in Program Data Memory, which is ridiculous whene there's 6GB of internal memory that could be used and we had an 8GB microSD card installed.

Sometimes, the crashes got so bad we had to restart the Galaxy Player, and when you did, it forgets your settings! Every single time we turned the device off it forgot all of our email inboxes, our synced Google accounts and our Wi-Fi passwords.

On the plus side, the Music and Video apps crashed far fewer times, but the music player slowed right down a few times, which is just as bad. Music quality was on a par with the iPod touch, but it supports a far wider range of codecs, including MP3, AAC, OGG, WMA, WAV and more. It's the same story with video, with MPEG4, H.264, H.263, WMV, DivX and Xvid all supported.

Our music was spotted and sorted easily enough over drag-and-drop, though you can use Samsung's Kies software if you want an iTunes-style option.

The SoundAlive equaliser mode is a nice idea, but trying to move a load of sliders when the device is barely responding is a recipe for frustration.

Video playback is generally smooth, and the screen is nice and bright, but the low resolution means that everything will inevitably look pixelated.

If a video doesn't fill the screen natively, you can make it bigger. However, instead of enlarging and cropping it, in the way Apple's devices do, it simply gets stretched to fill the space, meaning you really have to watch it in whatever the original aspect ratio was.

As far as the internet goes, the Galaxy Player is quite slow to connect to a Wi-Fi hotspot, but the browser is as fast to render as Android always is. No Android 2.2 means no Flash 10.1, but Eclair still has some great internet capabilities.

Alas, the usual Galaxy Player restrictions come into play. When it's working well, panning around and zooming on websites is smooth, but then it starts misbehaving and you might as well write into TechRadar using snail mail asking for the latest news, and we could write out the contents of the site by hand and post them back before you'd get anywhere with the Galaxy Player.

The two-megapixel camera has a fair few options, as well as a video recording mode. However, the quality is generally pretty low, as you can see on the the picture and video sample pages. Video recordings are 15 frames per second at a resolution of 320 x 240 allegedly, but when we played it back on our PC our software said it was 478 x 358.

There is the option to geotag photos, but that would depend on the GPS chip working, which it didn't for us. At all. Not once. Which also made the Maps app quite a bit less useful.

We liked

The Samsung Galaxy Player 50 has a nice build quality that makes it really very light. It feels plasticky, but we don't mind that. It's still incredibly solid.

The price is pretty good, especially considering the opportunity for microSD expansion. Even if you got the 16GB and a 32GB card, you couldn't match the 64GB maximum offered in the iPod touch range, but you really pay for that kind of storage. Add in the fact that there's a GPS chip and some other handy features and we think Samsung is aiming in the right area.

We disliked

The software is simply appalling. Frankly, if you tried to use this implementation of Android 2.1 to show someone how Google's OS can match Apple's iOS on non-phone devices, they'd laugh in your face (it also still frequently mentions 'your phone' in menus and alerts). How can it be that Android is so good on Samsung-made phones, such as the Samsung Galaxy S and Google Nexus S, but so bad here?

It may be £40 less than the iPod touch, but if it's only going to work a third of the time at most, it needs to cost a third of the price at most. It's the very definition of false economy.

With the Market refusing to install apps (if it even runs), it also loses the ability to stand up to Apple on expanded functionality.

The screen is even lower quality than the original iPod touch, let alone the new one's Retina display. The size is also getting a bit small for it to be any good for internet browsing – we reckon 3.5 inches is the minimum to be comfortable, though you may not mind this.

Verdict

The gulf in quality between this and the iPod touch is incredible. There's simply no reason to choose this over any other PMP, even if you really want the expandable storage. It barely functions, and you never know how long its grace will last even if it does work.

Frankly, if you want to go Android, buy an Orange San Francisco (for £50 less!) and just use it without a contract. Otherwise, do your sanity and blood pressure a favour and get an iPod touch.

Sony PRS-650 Reader Touch: Overview

The tablet market may be casting a dark shadow over the future of the ebook reader, but there are still two big-name manufacturers out there who believe that a dedicated reading device is what consumers want.

Both Amazon with its Kindle and Sony with its Reader range are slogging it out to become the number one ebook reader manufacturer.

You wouldn't have failed to notice that Amazon has pumped a lot of money into advertising its Kindle on TVs and billboards. But Sony, with little fanfare, has managed to impress TechRadar with the fantastic quality of its latest Reader, the Sony PRS-650 Reader Touch.

This isn't the first time Sony has released a touchscreen ebook reader but it is the first time it has launched a decent one.

Touchsreen and e-ink usually goes together like water and oil; the two technologies aren't compatible due to the extra layer that has to go on top of the e-ink display to make it touch-friendly.

This extra layer makes touch that little more sluggish and renders the screen almost unreadable in direct sunlight due to added shine.

Given that one of e-ink's USPs is that it works well in direct sunlight, the first Sony Reader Touch was hampered by too many glitches to make is a decent touchscreen device.

Sony has gone a long way to rectify this and the results (which we will relay further on in the review) are quite special.

Sony PRS-650 Reader Touch: Features

The Sony PRS-650 Reader Touch has been given a 6-inch screen with a 600 x 800 resolution. This is the same size as the original Sony Reader, but it's the build quality which has been improved dramatically.

An aluminium chassis replaces the dowdy plastic exterior of yore. This gives the Reader a nice weight – solid but far from too heavy. At 215g it won't give you arm and neck ache like the iPad does.

The chassis of the Sony Reader Touch is slim, too, at just 119 x 168 x 10mm, and Sony has made sure that every button on the device is flush to the bezel. This is a nice stylistic touch and one which means that you won't accidentally turn it on when it is in a bag.

As the Sony Reader does utilise touchscreen, the buttons on show are limited. On the front, just under the screen is a forward and back button for flipping pages and home, zoom and option buttons.

Situated on the bottom of the Sony Reader are a Micro USB port, volume control and 3.5mm jack.

The top features a sliding power button and two expandable memory slots: SD and MemoryStick.

Unfortunately Sony still seems intent of keeping the MemoryStick format alive. The slot may not take up much room on the top of the Reader Touch, but it does feel a little like overkill having both memory slots on board.

The only other noticeable feature on the Reader Touch is the stylus. Yes, the Sony Reader Touch comes with a stylus. This is a little strange considering how much the touchscreen has improved on the device, and is a feature which will become redundant in future renditions of the Reader Touch.

In our tests we hardly took the stylus out. Except to look at it to remind us what technology in 1999 looked like.

Sony PRS-650 Reader Touch: Performance

Switch the Sony PRS-650 Reader Touch on and it takes around 10 seconds to boot up your library of books.

The menu screen is nice and pleasant to look at. Sony has made significant improvements with its e-ink technology. It uses E Ink Pearl which is sharper, has a faster refresh rate and now comes with 16 levels of greyscale.

This does make a noticeable difference to the sharpness of the text on the screen.

The menu is broken down into your library of books (you get a number of books like Doctor No and Pride And Prejudice loaded on to the device). Your periodicals (newspaper articles), collections (books you have purchased) and any notes you have made.

This is where the Sony Reader Touch gets interesting. You have the ability to make notes on the books you read. You can underline, circle and scribble on the books you are reading. It is virtual graffiti and it is a great feature which is primed for students.

You can also double tap on words to load up the included dictionary to find out their definition.

And even better, you can find out the definition of foreign words as well, so there's no stopping you when reading even the most pretentious la literature.

The new and improved screen resolution means that the Reader Touch is a joy to use. Words sparkle on the page and even the page transition doesn't seem as jarring as normal e-ink readers. To get back to the menu screen you have to use the real home button.

Everything else though is done through the touchscreen. Sony has managed to create a touchscreen on the Sony Touch which does away with the shiny extra layer it had to put on its prior Touch ebook reader – this makes a world of difference.

Essentially Sony is using tiny sensors at the top and bottom of the screen which detect when a finger is present on the screen.

This means that swiping the screen can be done with the deftest of touches and there's no harder finger prodding when having to navigate menus.

E-Ink touchscreen displays are never going to compete with the capacitive screens of phones or tablets, but the screen on the Sony Reader Touch is a revelation for those who have tried touch on an e-ink device before.

Other slight features include bookmarking and searching. Searching brings up a QWERTY keyboard, which isn't as responsive as we'd have liked, but there was no muddling of letters when typing out the names of books.

The Sony Reader Touch also makes for a decent PDF viewer. This is because any PDFs you feed into the device are automatically resized for ease of view.

It's not that great at viewing images, though. While the front covers of books are great in thumbnail form when they are blown up they are less than impressive. And swiping through the images makes the e-ink have something of a fit. It looks like the image is drowning in treacle before actually coming up to the surface.

As there is a 3.5mm jack, you can also load up the device with MP3s to listen to while reading your missives.

When it comes to internal memory, the Sony Reader Touch has 2GB which is around 1,200 ebooks. This is expandable with the two memory slots.

After playing with the Sony Reader for a number of weeks, we can vouch that the battery life is impressive. Having listened to MP3s and loaded up myriad ebooks we didn't have to charge it for at least a week.

Sony is promoting it as around two week's juice, but this must be with little action.

Sony is making the Reader Touch as open as possible, so the file formats it will take are plentiful. The main ones include: EPUB eBooks (Adept) BBeB eBook, PDF, Word, TXT and RTF.

This does a good job of masking the fact that Sony doesn't have the might of the Amazon Kindle Store to go with its ebook reader.

As it is sporting EPUB, you can download ebooks from most online stores out there, though. The one which you won't be able to is, for obvious reasons, the Kindle Store.

With the release of the Reader Touch, Sony is promoting that you can now rent books through 50 council library websites.

We found this was easy enough to do, but there are some interesting things with the renting. Even though it is a digital file, each library only has so many licences, so like a real library the book you want may well be 'out on loan'. You do get notified when the ebook is available, though.

It's a nice idea, but one which is currently limited. If more libraries sign up then it may well take off.

What is much better is the search function of the Sony Reader website which offers up all the free domain books Google has to offer.

This saves you a lot of time wading through the priced books which Google also offers.

Sony PRS-650 Reader Touch: Verdict

The Sony PRS-650 Reader Touch is a mightily impressive piece of kit, but there are a few niggles with the product.

The biggest for us is its complete lack of wireless connectivity. That's right, there is no 3G or wireless, so downloading content on the go is a big no-no.

Amazon must have been extremely pleased about this, given that its latest Kindle offers Wi-Fi and/or 3G.

We have to admit that the amount of books you can pre-load onto a Reader Touch is more than you would probably get through in a lifetime, so there isn't that much need for wireless.

It does mean that you can't have RSS feeds on the device and those spur of the moment purchases of ebooks go out of the window.

The second niggle is the price. The Sony Reader Touch is an expensive bit of kit, priced at around £200.

In these wallet-tightening times this may be too much for some. But Sony has created a product well deserving of the price.

The aluminium chassis is one of the most desirable we have seen at any price, it feels perfect in the hand and is easy to read.

The quality of the touchscreen will blow most ebook reader naysayers away. But the price will unfortunately put others off – or at least turn them to the perfectly priced Amazon Kindle 3.

Archos is best known for its range of personal media players, although it recently entered the computing market with the Archos 10 netbook. The Archos 9 touchscreen tablet is its latest venture, but sadly proves frustrating to use.

At first glance the device looks smart. The chassis is solid and thin, although prolonged use can be awkward due to the weight. Thankfully a fold-out stand takes the burden when used at a desk.

Battery life - at 311-minutes - is excellent. The bright and sharp 8.9-inch screen makes up the bulk of the unit and impresses when used in darkened interiors. However, the highly reflective coating greatly limits outdoors use.

With an Intel Atom Z510 processor on board, performance is comparable to most modern netbooks. Basic office tasks run smoothly, but only the most simple games and multimedia applications will work.

Flawed usability

The greatest flaw is its usability. The touchscreen often proves unresponsive, rendering even the most basic tasks a frustrating experience. Selecting the wrong option in menus is all too easy, while dragging windows around is a shaky affair.

A tiny touch-sensitive panel on the right side of the device can be used as an alternative means of control and fares slightly better. Users will still long for a touchpad or a mouse, however.

An onscreen keyboard has also been included for typing use, but we found it difficult to bring up and operate. The lack of response means typing is laborious, and those with larger fingers will need to increase the dimensions until it covers most of the screen to minimise mistakes.

Connectivity is somewhat limited, with just a single USB port in place. Communication is via 802.11g Wi-Fi and 10/100 Ethernet and an integrated camera is built into the left side of the chassis.

The deeply flawed usability of the Archos 9, combined with the reflective screen, unfortunately make this tablet impossible to recommend.