Sony Reader Touch review

On the bright side, as you makes notes and highlight text, they're indexed on a separate screen - removing the need to flip through the entire book to find out at which point you started swearing at Samuel Beckett. Stuck on a troubling word? Double-tap it and a definition will appear at the bottom of the screen courtesy of the built-in Oxford English dictionary. Double-tap the definition itself and you'll be taken to that page in the dictionary, where you can look up meanings and search for words within the document by typing them into a virtual keyboard. Also impressive is the zoom slider, which allows you to smoothly zoom into text until it's comfortable to read.

Unfortunately, while the touch technology opens the door to a bevy of useful new features, it's also responsible for the Reader Touch's biggest flaw: glare. The touchscreen coating means too often we'd be immersed in our reading only to tilt the device and find the glare of a fluorescent light where 200 words used to be. At a stroke, you're snapped out of the reading experience - a significant problem for those looking to use it primarily as an eBook reader.

Which leaves us considering its merits as a research tool, but unfortunately, there are problems here too. We've already mentioned the lag when annotating text, but the Reader Touch also struggles with image-heavy PDFs, taking around six seconds to render a new page. For Government workers, designers, or anybody forced to wade through complex PDFs for a living, it's swiftly going to become impractical and frustrating.

So there it is. While the touchscreen offers much, in its current incarnation it so completely undermines the reading experience that it's difficult to recommend - especially at this price. And while that promise still remains, it appears Sony's predicament is no closer to being solved.

Author: Stuart Turton