A Year Later, Another Sony FAIL

September 4, 2010: Howard Stringer’s Failed Sony Promise

I quoted Stringer, who said:

Ninety percent of Sony products will connect to the internet and to each other by 2011, Sir Howard Stringer promised the 2009 CES crowd in the show’s opening keynote.

It’s 2011.

Sony has finally released a new Reader with WiFi.

But I guess the Reader falls within the 10% Sony doesn’t care about. Because read his quote again:

Ninety percent of Sony products will connect to the internet and to each other by 2011, Sir Howard Stringer promised the 2009 CES crowd in the show’s opening keynote.

Boldfaced emphasis added by me.

There’s been no indication that the new Sony Reader WiFi can connect to any other device — another Reader or anything else from Sony.

That’s just stupid. Even if there are DRM concerns, people should be able to swap DRM-free eBooks from one Reader to another.

Once again, Sony has failed to see what people want.

And has failed again to do something its competition hasn’t.

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Latest Sony Reader WiFi Video

This is the best video yet:

– shows all the new typeface options
– shows the universal Brightness/Contrast options
– shows how responsive freehand scribbling on the screen is
– he taps the Settings button, something no one else did

It also reveals that despite all the playing people did at IFA, these weren’t finished Sony Reader models!

Look at how many times he’s prevented from making a change stick with a popup dialog stating that option isn’t available in “demo mode”!

So even though he didn’t tap on About under Settings — something I’d been foaming at the mouth about on Twitter for days now — it might not have yielded any information anyway.