The announcement of the new Amazon Kindles caused all manner of excitement in the PC Pro office this week, until we realised Amazon actually had no plans to release the most exciting products in the UK. What a let-down. Still, that does at least give other manufacturers a chance to steal a march, and that appears to be exactly what Sony has done with its new Reader Wi-Fi, of which we have an early sample.

The first thing to notice when you pick up the Reader Wi-Fi is how light it is. It tipped our scales at just 162g, which makes the current Kindle look positively portly. With no keyboard it’s small enough to slip into an inside jacket pocket, and although it does feel a touch plasticky, it’s well made and the soft-touch plastic rear gives you a nice grippy surface to hold onto.

The screen is 6in across with a resolution of 600 x 800, and you get 1.4GB of usable memory expandable via a microSD slot, plus an infrared touchscreen just like the US-only Kindle Touch. This means you can sweep your finger right to left to turn a page, make handwritten notes and annotations with the supplied plastic stylus, and highlight text effortlessly (more on this later). For Sony, though, that’s nothing new. Where this device differs from its predecessors is in the inclusion of an 802.11n Wi-Fi adapter.

Once logged into your network using the onscreen keyboard, it offers direct access to the Sony ebook store, and through that a free subsection of Google Books, plus selected local libraries via the Overdrive eLibrary system. The latter provides time-limited DRM-based loans and, while the selection isn’t anywhere near as broad as the Kindle Store, the books are free.

Alas, the service isn’t yet up and running (and won’t be until the end of October), so we can’t pass judgement on its implementation in the device itself. We can only hope it rivals the gloriously simply system in the Kindle. But the good news is that you no longer need to rely on Sony’s Reader software to get content, which can only be a good thing.

The device’s onboard WebKit browser is fully functional and, in conjunction with the sensitive touchscreen, works surprisingly well. It’ll never rival a tablet for ease of use, but for accessing free ebook sites such as the Gutenberg Project, and even checking the odd email, it’s perfectly functional – and miles better than the Kindle’s browser. Even inertial scrolling and pinch-to-zoom operations function, although you may find the constant screen refresh sends you cross-eyed after a while.

Elsewhere, the Reader Wi-Fi exhibits similar strengths and weaknesses to previous Sony readers. It’s a superlative PDF-reading device. The multitouch capabilities of the screen mean even complex pages can be manipulated quickly and simply, and there are all manner of other ways of reading pages. You can set a custom crop to make pages with large borders more readable. In Navigate Page mode, the reader can be set to zoom right into the first column on a page, then follow the flow of text down then up and across when you hit the next button, instead of simply navigating to the following page.

Text can also be “reflowed” or stripped out so it fits the screen exactly. You can make handwritten annotations and highlight text for downloading via the Sony Reader software. A long press of the finger on a word, meanwhile, displays not only a dictionary definition at the bottom of the screen, but also pops up five buttons. These allow you to make a highlight the word, make a quick note and search the text, or carry out a keyword search in Google or Wikipedia.

And, although we can’t speak for the forthcoming Kindles, against the current model the Sony Reader Wi-Fi holds its own in terms of screen refresh speed and readability. Epub pages flip by in a single second, and as the screen uses the same E-Ink Pearl panel, contrast is largely the same as well. If anything the Kindle’s screen demonstrates a touch more contrast and crispness, but there’s very little in it. We took a macro photograph of each screen using identical lighting, shutter, aperture, ISO and white balance settings, then measured the black and “white” levels of each using Photoshop’s eyedropper tool. The result was a contrast ratio of 2.48:1 for the Kindle and 2.36:1 for the Sony.

The Sony Reader Wi-Fi is clearly a capable device; we can see that even without the benefit of being able to use the store on the device. It’s quick, readable and can handle PDF files in a much more intuitive and satisfactory way than the current Kindle – plus it’s incredibly light. The problem is with the price: at £130 we can’t see it competing with either current or future Kindles. We’ll have a full review when the services go live.

With the launch earlier today of its new Acrobat X platform, Adobe is naturally keen to highlight the strengths of its Acrobat authoring applications. With new capabilities such as action-based automation and enhanced portfolio handling, the new Acrobat X Pro (see full review) is certainly a decent upgrade.

By contrast, the new Acrobat X Standard (see full review) offers comparatively little. As many programs now offer their own in-built PDF authoring capabilities, and third-party alternatives such as Nitro and the more powerful Nuance offer similar office-focused PDF-based power (including OCR-based archiving and rich Word export), the one thing that Acrobat X Standard is crying out for, and that Adobe has again failed to deliver, is a major price cut.

Overall however I’d still call the new Acrobat X platform a major release, thanks primarily to the changes made to the free Reader X program.

Since its first launch back in 1993 and its first free release in 1996, the basic Reader has changed dramatically behind-the-scenes as Adobe has added support for new types of rich content such as 3D, maps, audio, video and interactive content. During this time however, the front-of-house Reader experience has changed relatively little and the program has increasingly come to seem antiquated, bloated and underpowered; a relic from the dawn of computing.

With Acrobat X, Adobe has finally realised just how central Reader is to the whole platform. As the full Adobe Reader X review discusses, there are a number of important new capabilities such as the streamlined interface, the ability to annotate your PDFs with sticky note and highlighting tools and, if the PDF was unlocked in Acrobat X Pro, the ability to use all annotation tools and view comments in Reader X’s new Comments pane.

The biggest advances are apparent when it comes to viewing PDF content on the web, including intelligent support for the host browser’s keyboard shortcuts and improved sandboxing. The most significant change of all is that when you open a PDF in your browser, it automatically opens in Reader X’s enhanced Reading mode in which the entire Reader interface is hidden and the end user can concentrate purely on the content.

On one level the new focus on Reading mode is just a cosmetic tweak, but I’d argue that it actually represents a fundamental shift on two fronts. Firstly, Adobe has finally recognised that its pre-internet dream of the paperless office built around Acrobat has lost, that the web has won and that Reader’s future therefore lies in supporting and extending the HTML-based browser as seamlessly as possible.

Second, Adobe has finally learned that Reader’s main job isn’t to highlight the benefits of Adobe’s PDF paid-for authoring tools, but to allow the end user to view and engage with content (the clue was in the title).

It’s taken ten releases and 17 years, but it looks like Adobe has finally got the message: Adobe Reader isn’t a cut-down loss-leader to the real paid-for Acrobat platform; rather, as the Acrobat runtime, Reader X is the platform.

This morning I saw a video that made me re-think all that. The new AM 300 developer’s kit from E Ink can handle animation pretty smoothly, and instant page turns, too. It uses the same technology as previous versions – little balls, black on one side and white on the other, which physically rotate to create areas of colour – but handles it all a lot faster.

This is down to the chips and firmware that control it. The importance of this is often underestimated; rival television manufacturers may use the same panel from the same factory, but the image quality of a TV is largely down to software. Even the performance of Formula One cars is largely down to their engine management and braking control software.

I’m waiting eagerly for the first reader to use the new kit. I just hope that the next generation of models won’t mess up all of this hard work by putting the buttons where I can’t reach them.

Unlike a traditional book, where I can turn a page with a quick, well-practiced swish of the thumb and forefinger, I instead need to press a plasticky little button and wait two seconds while the screen panics for a second or two, before finally delivering the next few hundred words. It’s not a pleasant experience, and I’ve already learned to hit the next-page button at the start of the final sentence, so as to minimise plot-destroying gaps in flow.

Every eBook reader we’ve had in has suffered from the same problem, as each shares the same E-Ink display – because there’s only one company in the world that makes them.

This is worrying, at least for anyone who makes eBook readers. If the screen is the problem, then throwing any amount of processing power or memory at it will do no good. What is needed before eBook readers take off in a big way, then, is nothing to do with public perception, nothing to do with ergonomic design and nothing to do with sensibly priced media: an entirely new screen technology is what’s called for.

There are plenty of contenders. Firstly it may be that E-ink develops faster transition times. The way it works, strangley, is that a layer of tiny balls is trapped between two layers of plastic. One side of the ball is negatively charged, and darkly coloured, while the other is positively charged and white. Passing a current through the layers can rotate the ball to show light or dark. It’s very clever, but it takes time.

Electro-wetting is another hopeful technology, which uses a layer of water and coloured oil between two plates. When a current is passed over a pixel, the water forces the dark oil out of the area, giving a white pixel. The advantage of this is that it is almost instantaneous compared to E-ink, so can even be used for video. The technology is also more easily adaptable for multiple colours – who wants to go back in time to monochrome screens, anyway?
Or maybe the answer lies with Organic Field-Effect Transistors (OFET) or Organic light-emitting diodes (OLED) or something that we haven’t even heard of yet. Perhaps, as I suspect is the case for the next decade or so, the answer lies in paper and ink; it’s cheaper, greener, more tactile and it even smells nice.

When I was young I used to think a lot about how to create a machine that could track and organise every single object in the world, giving easy access to bizarre information like exactly how many blue cars there were in my home town, how many people in my county, where the greatest concentration of certain types of animals were, and so on. It was perhaps a sign of some kind of obsessive compulsive disorder, which, if the highly organised state of my MP3 collection is anything to go by, is still ticking along nicely.

Many years later I heard about RFID, and got rather excited. These tiny, cheap chips allow the tracking of all sorts of inanimate objects, giving the ability to locate and count every single tiny item in a huge warehouse precisely.

In fact, the technology is already in use all over the world. Warehouses and factories are heavy users, certainly, but it’s also present in car keys, door entry cards, Oyster cards and all sorts of other everyday objects. It’s easy to imagine a future where most objects are trackable, a sort of more down to Earth version of my imagined machine – some call it the Internet of Things. As interesting as this idea is, it’s several years off at least, and the most interesting application for RFID in the short term is personal use within the home.

There are all sorts of things that you could use RFID for. A souvenir from your last holiday could be tagged so that anyone who places their phone near it has a slideshow of images from the trip open in a browser. You could add 6 tags to the sides of a cube and have a different radio station launch when each side is placed near your PC. You could even hand out business cards that load your LinkedIn profile when touched on a reader. The possibilities are endless, which is part of the appeal.

Up until now if you wanted to play with RFID chips you had to get your hands dirty with electronics and programming, but a new startup called tikitag is making things much simpler. A nicely packaged RFID reader and 25 sticky-backed tags are included in a starter package, along with software to perform all sorts of functions.

There are limitations, though. For now the service only works with tikitag RFID chips, although it is considering adding support for third party tags, and programs can’t be written by users – they have to come directly from tikitag’s developers. However, these are small compromises for what looks like an extremely user-friendly device. The Internet of Things may soon be coming to my flat.