Sony unveils wireless e-reader, ramping up assault on Kindle |
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Sony unveils wireless e-reader, ramping up assault on Kindle
Sony this morning launched its first wireless electronic reader, part of a broad assault on Amazon.com which has dominated the early market for e-readers. Sony's new $399 reader, the Daily Edition, has a 7-inch touchscreen display and 3G wireless connectivity via AT&T. By allowing for wireless downloads of books, newspapers, and other content, Sony matches a key feature of Amazon's Kindle readers. Sony now has a full lineup of new readers to take on the Kindle, including the $299 Touch Edition and the $199 Pocket Edition.
Sony's new Daily Edition will be available in December. The 6-inch Touch and 5-inch Pocket model don't have wireless capability, but all three Sony readers have touchscreen displays, allowing users to manipulate content directly on the screen with a stylus. That's an advantage over Kindle, which doesn't yet have touchscreen technology. By pricing the Pocket Edition at $199, Sony also undercuts the cheapest Kindle by a hundred bucks. Amazon now has the $299 Kindle 2 and the $489 large screen Kindle DX on the market.
Here's the new Sony lineup:
While Sony came out with its first electronic reader a year ahead of Kindle, Amazon's marketing machine (aided by a product plug from Oprah Winfrey) vaulted the Kindle past the Sony readers and made it the big player in the emerging e-reader market. Sony, however, has been trying to mount a comeback. Along with the new lineup of readers, Sony has boosted its collection of e-book titles by tapping into Google's massive book-scanning project, and it's embraced the open ePub standard for electronic books, in a jab at Kindle's content restrictions.
Sony also today announced that it will allow visitors to its online eBook store access to their local library's e-books. According to Sony, people can use their library card to download library e-books, download them to a PC and transfer them to a Sony reader.
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