Although more than half a year has passed since I had updated my PSR-505 (at Jan. 4th) I’d like to translate some of my notes made at the time so that to extend review made earlier here.

With firmware 1.1 update Sony Reader had received several major improvements. As it is was announced in official release:

• Support for EPUB file format
  
• Support for Adobe® Digital Editions 1.5 or later and Adobe DRM-protected content
  
• Enables text within PDF eBooks to be «reflowed». This will enlarge the text and improve the readability of text-based PDF’s
  
• Support for SDHC memory cards that have a capacity of more than 4 GB
  
• General fixes to improve stability and performance

Now speaking of all this from usability point of view. First of all there was great improvement in performance, gadget finally stopped lagging and became fast as it should be. At last there’s just nothing annoying, real ease of use.

I don’t know how about general version, but SDHC cards were simply ignored by my PRS in firmware 1.0. And support of that standard added to overall performance as well: faster loading from flash-card.

PDF has become a readable format as pages can be zoomed and text is reflowed. Although it was a pain previously it’s not much better now. Many .pdf files are composed in such a way that no text is rendered (INSecure mag. is a good example), and when multi-columns pages are met when trying to convert such files, you get textual noodles.

New icons were introduced: larger, simpler, better.

And, well, I’m not using EPUB, but open format support is a good sign.

Overall

Firmware 1.1 was a major improvement and all new books come already patched with it. That one is also the latest. Here’s the link where new firmware can be checked easily on official site (if any update will ever be implemented).