New Sony Reader PRS-300 Pocket Edition & PRS-600 Touch Edition

Electronic books or "e-books" have become one of the latest trends in technology and Sony is just one company that is profiting from the idea. The Sony Reader not only allows users to purchase and read books from the Sony Connect eBook store, but it can display Adobe PDFs, ePub format, personal documents, blogs, JPEG files, RSS newsfeeds, and Sony's BroadBand eBooks, as well as playing MP3 and unencrypted AAC audio files. It is viewable in direct sunlight and requires no power to keep a static image. While the Sony Reader has been available since 2006, on August 5th, 2009, Sony announced two new versions of the reader, the PRS-300 Pocket Edition and the PRS-600 Touch Edition.

PRS-300 or the "Pocket Edition":

The PRS-300 or the "Pocket Edition" has been put on the market to replace the now discontinued PRS-505. Priced very competitively at $199, it has a smaller display screen than the larger version (five inches) and a resolution of 800 x 600 pixels, with three adjustable font sizes. It features 512 MB of internal memory with 440 MB of it accessible. The battery is said to last up to two weeks on a single charge. It is available in navy blue, rose pink and silver.

PRS-600 or the "Touch Edition":

The PRS-600 or the "Touch Edition" is meant to replace the PRS-700 model that is no longer offered. It's the high-scale version of the Sony Reader and boasts a touch screen. The PRS-600 features six inch display screen with a resolution of 800 x 600 pixels and has 512 MB or memory with 380 MB accessible. It does, however, support the Sony Memory Stick Pro DUO and SDHC for expanded memory purposes. Like the PRS-300, a fully charged battery is said to last up two weeks but this edition is priced higher at $299. The PRS-600 is available in black, silver and red.

New Smart Phones Coming this Fall

Word has been out about Verizon's upcoming HTC Whitestone for some time now but now we finally have some specs and images to put with the name. Some other news that leaked was about Verizon's HTC Mega and some more news on the Tachi.

The Verizon Diamond 2, or "Whitestone" as it is being called, is trying for a September/October release date so we could see this in our hands i in the near feature. The specs for the Diamond 2 are pretty impressive, especially considering that this isn't a keyboard phone. The Diamond 2 has WM6.1, 512MB ROM/256MB RAM, 5-megapixel autofocus camera with anti-handshaking, GSM/CDMA World Phone, Qualcomm 7600 at 528MHz, 3.6" WVGA touchscreen and gpsOne (aGPS and full GPS). One thing it doesn't have that some people may have been expecting is WM6.5 on launch.

The next piece of leaked intel comes in for the Verizon HTC Mega. Until recently, we haven't known a whole lot about the HTC Mega. We knew it had new TouchFlo 2D and some other low-range specs but that's about it. But now we have some new information and it comes as follows. The HTC Mega will have WM6.5, 256MB ROM/256MB RAM, GSM/GPRS Edge/HDSPA, gpsOne, Qualcomm 7225 at 528MHz and a 3-megapixel fixed-focus camera. As you can see, the HTC Mega isn't the greatest thing to come out, but it is obvious that it is geared more towards the low-end of the market, and even so it isn't bad for that group.

The only new news on the Tachi is this picture of it's design. The biggest noticeable difference is that the d-pad doesn't have as much chrome on it. But that is basically it so far. One thing we can almost be sure of is that the Tachi will more than likely not be available in the U.S and instead will be available in China.

Well it sure is good to finally put a face to the name with the Diamond 2 and the HTC Mega and I guess it is even a good thing that we saw the latest Tachi version. It will be good to see how these devices when they hit store shelves and we can finally get them in our hands.