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I had the opportunity to travel to Sony a few weeks ago and preview the new Sony Reader hands on and meet with the product manager. Overall, I enjoyed the Sony Reader. I love reading books so this is something that naturally appeals to me. It's clear that Sony has done a lot of work on this and has been working on it for a long, long time. At my previous company, we worked with Franklin Electronics on their eBookman product, so I understand how hard it is to build a complete system like what Sony is trying to make.

I was really impressed with the screen on the device. It uses a 2nd generation ePaper from a company called eInk . The lack of good resolution, high contrast screens is something that has held back reading documents electronically for me. It just tires the eyes too much to read anything more than a few pages on a computer screen. And while I did often carry ebooks on my Palm device in the past, the screen was just too small. Well, that doesn’t seem to be a problem anymore. I was also really impressed by the weight and thinness of the unit and the fact that the battery is good for 7500 page views.

Here is a video I took of flipping through some pages on the Reader, and I uploaded some pictures as well. The unit is small and light enough that you can hold it in one hand and just flip through the pages as opposed to paper books which require you to hold them with two hands or least use two hands to switch pages. I thought the user interface was very good and easy to use without much instruction. With just a few moments of instruction we were up and running and I am sure we could have figured out how to use the Reader without that.

I liked the fact that you could change the font size easily to make the text easier to read. This is something of course what you cannot do in a real book. The docking station is really handsome. I liked the fact you listen to audio at the same time as you are reading. I liked the bookmark system. I liked that the device could natively read PDF files. They connect store reminded me of the iTunes store and I thought that was good. I think the Sony reps said they expect to have about 10,000 or more books available at launch.

I am hoping that this product will be successful and that there will be follow on versions and further innovation in this area. I admire that Sony is trying to reinvent the category of ebooks. Here are some things that I thought could be improved upon in future versions or updates:

• I was disappointed the device is not natively support HTML or connect to the Internet directly or through an accessory like a WiFi modem. This seems especially strange to me given the importance of the web and user generated content.
• I was surprised that by default when you buy books from the Connect store you have to manually drag them to your device for them to sync. I expected that they would just sync automatically.
• The unit could look slicker. If you compare the industrial design of the Reader with something like the Mylo, VAIO UMPC, or the PSP it almost doesn't look like it comes from the same company.
• I was surprised that the cases don't have pockets where you can put notes or business cards, so this is an obvious opportunity for people who make cases. I don’t.
• I was disappointed that you need an external backlight. They showed us a third-party backlight that at only $10 seemed very reasonable. If you like to read in bed, I think you need one.