Conversations interrupted
A good weekend last weekend - up to Staffs for Oatley minor's naming, with an overnight stay in Leamington (at the Angel Hotel) en route. Some follow-on notes from conversations:
For ngma: the best source for non-pink girl's clothes (and non-blue boy's clothes) that we've found is Vertbaudet. French, as you might expect from the name.
For ruthj and jow_n_chris, the iPhone/iPod Touch ebook app was Stanza. The iPod Touch and the Sony PRS-505 are comparable in price: £165/£214/£283 for 8Gb/16Gb/32Gb iPod Touch vs. £199 for the PRS-505 (256Mb internal, expandable via SD cards). Battery life on the PRS-505 is excellent (Sony claim 6000+ page turns, which I suspect is optimistic), whereas the iPod lasts about a day of solid reading. On the other hand, the iPod does more than read ebooks. Both support EPUB format ebooks (which is what Waterstones sell), although the implementation on the PRS-505 isn't great (for example, only a partial implementation of CSS2, significantly below that required by the OPS component of the EPUB spec). Sony's support for the PRS-505 isn't great; there has been one firmware update to date in the US which introduced EPUB support (the UK version has always had support for EPUB).
A summary:
PRS-505iPod Touch/iPhone + Stanza Price£199£165 (8Gb)
£214 (16Gb)
£283 (32Gb) Battery life6000+ page turns (over a week in standby)~1 day Display6" diagonal
600x800
3 bit grayscale eInk3.5" diagonal
480x320
colour LCD Daylight visibilityExcellentGood Night visibilityNone (no backlight)Good Page turn speed~0.5sInstant Prerender speed10-15s2-3s Internal Memory256Mb8Gb/16Gb/32Gb Additional MemorySD cardNone ePub supportPartialGood MP3 playbackYes (but hampered by limited memory and poor battery life)Yes User InterfacePhysical buttons (PRS-700 has touch screen)Multitouch screen Aspect switchYes (but hampered by physical UI)Yes (via accelerometer) EBook UploadSony software (Windows only)
Calibre (multiplatform)Stanza desktop (Mac only)
Calibre (multiplatform)
Download over wifi Application supportNoYes Software updateInfrequentFrequent
My feeling is that the iPod Touch has the edge in terms of usability and readability (the page turn speed on the PRS-505 is still a limitation), although the PRS-505's display is very legible. Having used both for at least a couple of weeks, I'd recommend the iPod Touch/iPhone + Stanza more strongly.