At TechCrunch, Alexia Tsotsis posts an interesting meditation on how tricky most household appliance interfaces have become. Coffee makers, microwave ovens, even pepper grinders have become much more complex than they used to be—sometimes hilariously so: Many people received iPads and iPhones this Christmas, and because of Apple’s legendary intuitive and straightforward design, could pull them right out of the box and commence using. Not the case with a battery powered pepper grinder one of my relatives received at our gift exchange. It took three people to put together and when we did get it to...

And now I come to the end of my two-week experiment with the Sony Reader PRS-700. It’s been interesting, and I’ll have some last thoughts on the whole experience after the jump. But as I was getting ready to package the device up, I realized there was one last function that I hadn’t tested yet: how it played audio. Audio The device came pre-loaded with two piano jazz MP3s by Jun-ichi Nagahara, so I plugged in my earphones and listened through them. The control scheme was simple enough: a pause button, a slider showing how far through an audio file one...

One of the big tests for the Sony PRS-700, and the thing I’ve been studying the most, is how well it displays the different formats of books it reads. Over the last few days, I have done more reading than I had done in the previous month, and am ready to make some observations. In this post, I will cover ePub and LRF-formatted books. In the next one, I will look at PDFs. Note that the comparison photos above and below may not show any of the platforms at its best, due to strange tricks that backlighting and flash photography play on...

I am in St. Louis this weekend, along with my parents, for a visit to my brother, sister-in-law, and four nieces and nephews. I am away from my own desktop computer, and am having to make do with a slightly flaky Ubuntu laptop---and do not quite have either the energy or the facilities to write the in-depth examination of how the PRS-700 deals with different e-book formats that I had intended. However, I have brought along the PRS-700 (as well as my iPod Touch) and have observed a few possibly-unexpected uses of the Sony Reader---and another flaw or two---along the way. (Update:...