I got a Sony Reader Pocket Edition for Christmas and absolutely love it. While choosing which ereader to go for, Lydia very kindly leant me her Kindle, Atlas, so I could try out the electronic book format. It’s a while since I used Atlas so I apologise if I miss anything out. Also, apologies for the switches between imperial and metric measurements and my insistence on working in GBP. 
The Kindle is about 4cm longer and 2 cm wider than the Sony. Most of the extra space is taken up by the keyboard, but there are also large borders around the screen which feel unnecessary. I prefer the look of the Sony which is styled like a book (albeit one that doesn’t open), with three sides in a different material. The Kindle’s styling doesn’t exactly set the world alight. The Kindle comes in white. The Sony is available in Silver or Pink in the UK and seems to come in Navy Blue in America (annoying since I would have preferred blue).
Considering the extra size, the Kindle screen is 6” whereas the Sony is only an inch smaller. The screens are both on a par in terms of clarity, although I watched a video of the two next to each other and the definition on the Sony appeared a little better. Neither of the devices has a touch screen but both screens can be rotated. You can also increase the text size on each. I’ve read mine by lamplight and on a train without issues so the lack of backlight isn’t an issue – it’s exactly like reading a book.
Weight-wise, the Kindle is 290g and the Sony is 240g so not that much difference.
The Kindle has some extra features - you can browse Wikipedia and look things up in the (American) dictionary; both very useful. I think you can also add notes, which is nice. I like the fact that you can download a book straight onto the device. The Kindle has a selection of images available as a screensaver which were quite pretty but made it more difficult to actually switch the device off. One of the less successful features is Text to Speech which (at least, on the book I tried it with) was like having Stephen Hawking read you a bedtime story.
The Kindle seems well set up in the US market but in Europe the lack of access to other internet sites and the need to buy books from Amazon.com (in USD, and I believe, at a higher cost that in the States) is off-putting; the Kindle does not recognise the standard epub eBook format. There now seems to be the added issue of Amazon removing books from peoples Kindles after the publisher withdrew them – quite annoying when you’ve paid for a book!
The Sony Reader is a little short on extra functions but at £149 it is a fair bit cheaper than the Kindle (which would probably work out at about £200 once the shipping and import fees are added). I like the numbered buttons on the side which enable faster navigation in the menus. I think I prefer the next page buttons on the Kindle, purely for their location at the side of the screen.
The Kindle holds about 1500 books, while my little Reader only holds 350. Of course, you can store books on your computer and I think I’d struggle to put 350 books on (I think I’m at 135 with all the freebies I downloaded from the Sony site).
I don’t think the Kindle comes with a case but the Reader was supplied with a little padded storage pouch. I didn’t know about this before it arrived but I’m now glad I resisted the temptation to buy a leather case at the time of purchase.
The menus on both are easy to navigate, although the numbered buttons on the Reader speed up the process. Sadly, the Sony Library computer software is awful (although slightly better than the Walkman software) – once you’ve got to grips with it, it’s just a case of dragging and dropping but there’s little else to it which is a shame, it would improve the whole experience if it was more pleasant to use. I haven’t used the software for the Kindle so no comment on that.
So, in terms of which is better – it depends what you want. If you’re in America then the Kindle probably has a lot more to offer you. In Europe, the limitations would put me off - it feels like Amazon don’t really care about us. I really like the Sony, which does everything I could ask of it, but if you’re after a little bit more I’d shop around - there seems to be a lot of choice in ereaders at the moment (I notice that Waterstones are no longer only selling Sony) so it would be interesting to see what some of the others were like.
One thing I find very frustrating is having to pay almost full price for eBooks. Surely this defeats the object slightly? The Waterstones sale actually meant that it was cheaper to buy a real book at one point. Hopefully this will change as the format becomes more popular. For the moment I will content myself with the free classic stuff on Project Gutenberg.
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