I received my Sony PRS 505 reader last Monday and was surprised on its fast shipment through SonyStyle website. Before even making a purchase, I read multiple dozens of reviews and videos detailing the product. Knowing the pros and cons, I ordered it with no second thought and upon receiving the device, there was no surprises. To make this review easy to digest, I'll provide some pros and cons, then a conclusion as to whether the price value of the reader was worth the purchase. I also have to address that I paid $199 for it after a SonyStyle $100 credit. From a consumer stand point, I've had this device for 3 days now and have played with it enough times to explore all of its capabilities.

Pros:

• Compact, light-weight with a size of a DVD case which makes it easy to carry around on trips and/or while waiting when getting your car fixed, etc.
• Transfer of files between your PC and the device is easy through the USB connection.
• It supports PDF files, which I liked since most ebooks are in preserved in this format. This is the main reason I picked Sony over Kindle.
• The support for extra memory cards allows for the device to hold thousands of books. The internal device memory has 256MB which is enough to hold books to last you for the entire year.
  
• It plays MP3 so you can listen to your audio books.
• Long lasting battery life.
  

Cons:

• The readability on PDF files is bad. I wouldn't suggest using the reader to facilitate a technical books (ie. programming, math, etc.) but the regular big font PDFs are good.
• Slow response on page turns. This is more apparent when starting on a page where you last left off. If the last page that I read was on page 30, then there will be a slight 5-7 seconds delay before the page appears. It can be a little bit annoying but it can be worse.
• The eBook library software that came with it is poorly designed and is very minimal to say the least.
• No keyword such function.
  

Suggestions:
When reading PDF files that are hard to read, the first solution that I found was to crop the PDFs top, bottom and sides to eliminate some of the white space using Adobe Acrobat. This will at least get you a little bit of increased font size. The second solution is to view the reader in 'landscape' mode which works the best since you're only viewing the ebook half a page at a time. The downfall is that it will take you two clicks to read a page but this is not bad at all compared to reading smaller font size. My suggestion to Sony for the next version is to make the reader at least 8 1/2 x 11 since most books are in this format. Increasing it to this size will highly improve the readability and font size can be eliminated as such since there will be no need. While 8 1/2 x 11 is much larger, I don't think that it sacrifices convenience at all since most consumers mostly worry about the weight rather than the size. Think of it as a regular sized lightweight notepad that contains 1000's of books.

Conclusion:
The big question that most potential customers asks is, is the Sony PRS 505 really worth the purchase? If you're traveling a lot and mostly read non-technical books, this is definitely worth it. For the sake of convenience, this is really a nice thing to have compared to lugging a few books around. Since I read a mixture of business and technical books, this is nice to have for the reason I stated above. Since technical books are meant as references, I will continually purchase those since I occassioinally like to collect paperback copies of them so I can quickly glance topics that I need. Since I already have an MP3 player, I don't think that I will be using the built-in MP3 player anytime soon, but perhaps on long trips where I don't want to carry two things. For the $299 price tag, it can be worth it if you love to read--but if you're an occassional reader and don't travel as much, look elsewhere to spend your precious cash.

- Dennis Rongo