Two popular options are the Sony Reader and the Amazon Kindle. This head-to-head comparison will help you figure out which is worth your money – Kindle vs Sony Reader.

Design and Ergonomics

Sony’s Readers tend to have a flashier exterior, with rounded corners and a semi-gloss finish that’s available in bright colors, such as red and pink. The blockier Kindles have matte finishes that are only available in basic colors like graphite (dark gray) and white. Although the Kindles look cool in their own way, Sony’s Reader has better aesthetics.

Another difference is the keyboard that’s included on the Kindle. This is used to help navigate the device and search for titles both on the Amazon store and in your Kindle library. Sony’s Reader, on the other hand, offers a touch screen interface on all of its current generation Reader products. This is an important point that buyers should consider. Some will likely prefer the tactile feel of the Kindle’s buttons, but others will prefer the more compact size made available by the Reader’s touchscreen.

Sony’s Reader comes in a wider variety of sizes, and is generally lighter than the Kindle. The Pocket Edition is just 5.5 ounces, the Touch Edition is 7.5 ounces, and the Daily Edition is 9.6 ounces. The latest generation Kindle is 8.5 ounces, while the Kindle DX is a whopping 18.9 ounces. Although these differences may seem small at times, they’re noticeable. Remember, this is a device you may be holding for hours – every ounce saved counts.

Hardware Features

Amazon’s Kindle has a robust feature set, particularly when it comes to connectivity. Even the most basic Kindle comes with WiFi, while the Kindle 3G has “free” 3G service (the cost of delivering the content is included in the price). This means that you’ll be able to easily purchase new books while on the go, or re-download books that you already purchased but have since discarded.

Sony only offers WiFi and free 3G with its Daily Edition, which is the most expensive model. This is a serious downside for a gadget that’s supposed to replace books, as it means fooling around with yet another cable and yet more syncing software.

The Kindle offers superior built-in memory, at four gigabytes. The Sony Readers offer half that, but some have superior support for memory upgrades. The Daily Edition, for example, can support Memory Stick Duo and SD Cards up to 32GB.

Battery life is great on both devices, although generally better on the Kindle, which can last for over a month if the WiFi is off. With that said however, even the Sony Readers can generally be used for weeks between charges.

Software & Format Support

While both Sony and Amazon offer stores for their particular eReaders, Amazon’s is unsurprisingly the better option. The selection available on Amazon.com is unrivaled, and the store is extremely easy to navigate. There’s also a wealth of consumer reviews available on various books, making it easier to find what’s great and avoid what’s not.

Both the Kindle and the Sony Reader offer support for PDF files, but Amazon still doesn’t offer support for ePub. Since most libraries that are adopting eBook loans are doing so by offering books in ePub format, this is a glaring gap in Amazon’s file support.

Verdict

As you can see, there’s a lot of trade-offs between these two devices. Sony’s Readers are lighter and have touchscreen support, but they have worst connectivity. And while Amazon offers a better store, it has inferior format support.

However, my opinion swings in the favor of the Kindle because of price. The base Kindle is available for $139.99, while the Reader Pocket Edition often sells between $160 and $180. Since the pocket edition has a smaller display and lacks any wireless connectivity, that’s a nasty price gap. It’s worse with the Touch Edition, which sells for $230.

It’s hard to justify spending more than $200 on an eReader when a tablet like the iPad 2 can be had for $499. Still, Sony’s Pocket Edition has a lot of appeal, as it’s incredibly small and light. That makes it a superb eReader for travelers – so long as you have a laptop from which you can download content.

I am using the term ‘font’ here because it is the more used term, though the accurate one is – typeface, when we talk about its appearance. As Type Designer Norbert Florendo put it – font is what you use, and typeface is what you see. Semantics aside, when we attempt to select a font, we do quite a lot of comparing between the different fonts available to us. Here are seven tools which might help you to pick the right font for your work.

Typetester

The online font application is primarily designed for web designers who spend an awful lot of time getting the right screen font. The tool not only lets you select fonts from different lists (web safe list; Windows list; Mac list; Google list) but also gives you a few dropdowns to play with and modify the font properties. You can enter your own sample text and also play around with the color.

You can also pick a variety of other fonts that may not be there on these lists. You can experiment on the sample text by comparing three different fonts at one time or picking one font and customizing the properties in the three columns. The slick application gives you a useful view side-by-side. (See Directory mention)

FontComparer

This is another dynamic comparison tool which lets you compare different web fonts at a glance. The choice of fonts comes from Google’s font directory and TypeKit. You can type in your own text and see how the fonts change the look of the title and a line of text. When you find a font you like, mouse-over the sample text to make the “Get Font” link appear. Click on this link and the CSS for that font will be displayed in a frame at the foot of the webpage. You can copy-paste the code into your own web page HTML code. (See Directory mention)

Font Tester

Font Tester is not as visually pleasing as the first web app on our list, but there’s no denying its usefulness as it comes with a few more options that allow you to preview and pick the right font. You can use the font comparison and check out three styles side-by-side. You can use the default text or again enter your own. Next, play around with the CSS properties (all font related ones are included) to get just the right look you want for your web design. A color picker allows you to further fine-tune the appearance. There’s also a character map which you can use to quickly find the matching HTML Entity for a particular character.

Designer Plaything

Experiment with different typefaces and color combination on this online tool. Tweak the text that relates to body copy and headlines, and play with the background and body text colors. The plus is that you will be given an instant feedback as to whether your chosen combination meets with World wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommendations.

You can set the width of the sample article along with the length of the article and the paragraphs. Designing for different environments is also helped by the instant color contrast and brightness accessibility recommendations from both W3C and Hewlett Packard.

Font Dragr

This font comparison tool is an experimental but interesting application of HTML5. Therefore it will only work in browsers that support the new standard. Right now it’s Firefox 3.6 and above. You can simply drag and drop any truetype (ttf), opentype (otf), scalable vector graphics (svg) or Web Open Font Format (WOFF) fonts from the desktop to the left hand side bar and it changes the font-family of the text. The default text can be edited to include your own. You can select the fonts on the left panel and observe the changes.

So far we have looked at five online web apps that let us preview and select the right font. If you are looking for a desktop freeware instead, take a chance with FontViewOK (ver.2.15). It’s a Windows only app and as our brief review will tell you, it’s simpler than the web apps we have covered above.

Are you a web designer who needs a font comparison tool in his web design toolkit? Which are the other font related apps you would like to recommend?

Image Credit: Shutterstock

We also have reviewed a number of tools that run multiple searches at a time: Search Opener is a good example.

Today’s little collection includes best multi-feature web-based tools to search at least two search engines and see results side by side (either to compare  them or just to be able to see more search results at a time):

Search in Two Languages Side-by-Side

2Lingual is a web-based tool that works surprisingly fast and lets you search in two languages with one click.

The app uses Google translate to automatically recognize and translate your query into the second language (this feature can be turned off).

Where the fun is:..

Since this app was reviewed by MUO 2 years ago, there have been 2 important improvements:

• The tool now supports 45 languages;
• The tool now offers smooth “Instant” experience (it starts searching before you enter the full query. I wish it had Google Suggest support as well).

There is also Twitter Bilingual (also reviewed by MUO previously) search that works pretty much the same but sourcing results from Twitter real time results. It currently supports 21 languages.

Search Two Search Engines Side-by-Side

There are quite a few tools that let you compare two sets of results side by side. Not all of them offer a quick way to switch between the available search engines though.

The one app that does this job comparatively well is Googawho: just type your query, get the initial columns of results and click through search engines in the header to switch between the engines.

Supported search engines: Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Ask, InfoSpace, AltaVista, Lycos, Dogpile.

Where the fun is:..

• Open results in new tabs / windows by holding SHIFT while clicking the link;
• Click “Tabulizer!” button to open all supported search engine results in new tabs;
• Install Googawho search plugin to easily search from your browser.

Search Two Verticals Side-by-Side

Like the above tool, SearchBoth gives access to several search engines but there’s no easy way to switch between them. What the tool offers though is a handy option to click through vertical search sections, like:

• Images;
• Videos;
• Shopping results;
• News Search
• Blog search.

Note: Googawho does have links for “News”, “Images” and “Videos” as well but they didn’t always work for me.

The ability to search images in two engines simultaneously can really come in handy!

Where the fun is:..

• Hover over any part to enlarge it (or click the “lock” icon to fix the width);
• Navigate through various local tool versions to combine and compare search engines from your country.

Don’t forget to check out related search-productivity tools and tips:

• Easily switch between multiple search engines with FireFox addon Boounce (as well as these addons that let you jump from Google search results to other search engines);
• How To Load Google Search Results In A Preview Panel (On The Same Page): view search results without ever leaving the results page.

Have you ever played with any of the tools above? Do you have your own favorites? Please share your thoughts!

Image Credit: seosmarty

Here at MakeUseOf, we’ve covered lots of apps that merge files, such as Mark’s article on how to merge PDF files, or Saikat’s article on how to merge video files. However, what if you just want to merge documents or folders filled with seemingly duplicate lists of files?

In Windows, the task isn’t quite as simple as it is in Linux, but the need does arise every now and then. Maybe you’ve had two common directories for a long time, and despite all efforts to keep them in sync, they no longer contain the same files. Or maybe you’ve been editing the same document in several locations, and you’re no longer sure which one is the most recent, and you don’t want to lose anything important in any one of the copies?  The ability to compare seemingly duplicate files or folders can really come in handy sometimes.

An Open Source application that offers that “diff” functionality to Windows users is a free duplicate files utility called WinMerge. This program will accept three arguments – a file or folder to display on the left, a file or folder to display on the right, and a filter that advanced users can use to manipulate the comparison and merge.

Comparing Two Duplicate Folders

One of the most likely uses for this helpful application is to compare two files that you assume were synced, but maybe, for whatever reason, you’ve started to doubt that the two folders are truly duplicates. The WinMerge duplicate files utility can not only tell you whether the two folders are duplicates, but it can highlight the exact differences so that you can decide what you need to do to make the two folders true duplicates.

To portray how this works with folder contents, I’ve created two test folders that contain identical text and image files, except for two differences inside the folders. Folder number two contains an extra text file and an extra image file. As you can see above, I’ve selected folder1 and folder2 as the head to head comparison. Within seconds of clicking OK, the results were in.

As you can see, WinMerge immediately identified the two discrepancies. MyImage5.bmp and TextDocument4.txt are instantly identified as only existing in the folder on the right, Folder 2. The application even provides the file modification dates so that you can see whether there are even differences in when the files were modified. There are certainly cases where you may have a file with the same name, but one is updated while the other isn’t. This software will identify those differences as well.

Comparing Two Duplicate Files

To perform this experiment, I modified TextDocument1.txt and TextDocument2.txt in Folder2 so that they both contain identical text. Basically, I inserted the first three pages of Moby Dick into each file. Then, I inserted three unique sentences in file one, and one unique sentence in file two. The test is to see whether WinMerge can correctly isolate and identify all three differences between these two files.

Here, I’ve set document1 on the left and document2 on the right. In this case, no filters apply – I wanted to compare both files line for line and word for word.

As you can see above, the application successfully identified every single difference. The line containing the alteration is highlighted, and the alteration itself is further highlighted so that you can quickly scroll across the lines of text and see what the exact differences are. The nice thing about this is that if you’re working on a research paper and you’ve added entire paragraphs to the older copy, while you’re in this left window/right window mode, you can actually edit either document just like you would in any text editor.

Here, I’ve highlighted the unique line in document1 and pasted it into the same line in document2. You could do this for individual lines or entire paragraphs – edit either document however you see fit!

Performing A Merge

While manually going through the comparison results line by line and copying them over to the document of the latest version would certainly work, the software wouldn’t really be called WinMerge if there wasn’t some sort of automated approach to the process. Well, there certainly is. One of the top menu items is “Merge,” and the options under this menu item list everything you’ll need to merge any duplicate files or directories you may have.

The first nine options in this menu are actually what I would call “semi-automatic” merging. You can either use the menu options or the keyboard commands to step through each difference in the files, and then either copy the additional text to the right or the left document, depending which one you want to make your “master” document.

The last two options are actually the fully automated merge. Once you quickly scroll down through the differences in the files and you’re satisfied that you want to keep all of the unique content from one file and move it to the other, just select the file you want to merge to, and choose either “Copy All to Right” or “Copy All to Left.” These options automatically fly down through all differences and modify the master file so that it contains any additional content the other file may have. Once the process is through, your files or folders will once again be identical.

Have you ever had the need to compare or merge two duplicate files or folders? Have you ever tried the WinMerge duplicate files utility? Share your opinions and insight in the comments section below.

When you compare and contrast the iPhone and iPod Touch, there is little difference between the outside design features of the two, and though under their hood they both share similar robust features, there are some significant differences that you should consider in deciding which one to purchase.

Compare and Contrast: iPhone and iPod Touch Have Similar Features

Both the iPhone and iPod Touch have the following features in common:

“¢ Both share Apple’s 3.0 operating system which features touch technology; cut, copy and pasting; landscape keyboard typing, spotlight search features, and Wi-Fi access, which makes them essentially a computer in the palm of your hand. Touch and accelerometer technology by the way provides for smooth and easy navigation on the devices, enabling users to zoom in and out on images and webpages, and use titling and other hand movements to play games and other similar applications.

“¢ Both include the following default applications: Safari web browser; Calendar, Internet Mail, Address Book; YouTube video player, Calculator, Notes, Photo Browser, Stocks reporting, Weather reporting; Clock, GPS Maps, Voice Memo, Nike + iPod exercise tracking support, and an iPod music player app.

“¢ You can sync both devices to Apple’s iTunes software (for both Mac and Windows PC) to add and remove songs, videos, photos, and other data files. The entire process is fairly automatic, and with an Apple MobileMe account you can sync information to the devices wirelessly.

“¢ The iTunes App Store features 5,000+ applications specifically designed mostly by third party developers to run on both devices.

“¢ Both devices feature voice-control technology to navigate music playback with spoken commands. This is done on the devices themselves or through the remote mic on the earphones that come with the devices. (Note: only the 32GB and 64GB models of iPod Touch come with voice control.)

The iPod Touch

The third generation iPod Touch comes in three models: 8GB ($199), 32GB ($299), and 64GB ($399). These models can hold from 1,750 to 14,000 songs, 10,000 to 90,000 photos, and up to 30 hours music and 6 hours of video playback time. However, these stats depend a lot on how you use the device and what other data files you have stored on them. Plus, in my average use of both both the iPod Touch and the iPhone 3G, the battery usage isn’t that great. So get accustomed to daily charging.

No Phone

Of course, the iPod Touch models do not come with a phone or instant messaging. However, there are several third party apps like AIM that enable users to use instant messaging on the touch. And there are a few hacks, such as one that involves using Skype,  for making phone calls on the touch. Though of course you still need a Wi-Fi connection and a remote microphone on say the earphone cord to make the calls.

WiFi But No 3G

The iPod Touch does not require an AT&T phone or WiFi contract to use it, which saves you well over $700 per year. As with the iPhone, the iPod Touch has built-in WiFi capability but it does not have what’s called 3G access, which only comes with the iPhone 3G and 3GS. So basically, if the places you travel to and frequent have WiFi servers, you should be okay with Internet access on the device. For instance, McDonald’s now provides free Wi-Fi connections, as do many colleges and universities. With 3G capability, however, you pretty much have connections to the Internet nearly everywhere AT&T provide the services.

No Camera or Video Cam

The iPod Touch also lacks a camera and video recorder. This has been a huge criticism of the device, and many critics think that a digital camera should have been included with the third generation touch. More than likely the fourth gen will finally get this feature.

iPhone 3G and 3GS

The latest version of the iPhone comes in two models: the iPhone 3G 8GB (from $99), 16GB (from $199) and the 32GB (from $299) The price variances are also based on a required two-year wireless service contract with AT&T, starting at $69.99 per month. AT&T subsidizes the iPhone, which attributes to its lower cost than the iPod Touch. You can purchase an iPhone without an AT&T service contract, but it will cost you between $499 and $699. See rate plans. You will also want to check the availability of AT&T services in your area for the terms of 3G service, signal strength, bandwidth speeds, and phone rates.

Phone and Instant Messaging

Of course the iPhone does include a full service phone and AT&T instant messaging. Rates for messaging are $5 per month for 200 messages, $15 per month for 1500 messages, or $20 per month for unlimited SMS messages. There’s also higher cost family packages. But again, as stated above, there are applications for the iPhone that do instant messaging for free, such as IM+Lite.

The voice technology of the iPhone 3GS also extends to voice dialing so that you can make voice commands to call someone in your list of contacts or to dial a specific number.

Wi-Fi, 3G, and EDGE Connectivity

With the AT&T service plan, each of the iPhone models comes with wireless Internet and network connections. So in places where you get free or paid Wi-Fi connections, your iPhone is automatically connected. If however you are in a location with no Wi-Fi or free Wi-Fi, you can connect to the Internet through AT&T”˜s 3G and EDGE wireless connection services. The 3G connection is about is even faster than traditional Wi-Fi connection speeds, while the EDGE connection is slow as a turtle.

Camera and Video Recorder

Both the iPhone 3G and 3GS include a digital camera. The 3G has a 2 megapixel sensor while the 3GS modal has 3 megapixels, plus autofocusing and photo geotagging, which keeps track of the locations where you shot images using the iPhone”˜s camera. iPhone 3GS also includes built-in video recording, for a clear 30 frames per second capturing.

The 3G iPhone does not include a video recorder; however, there are a few third party applications, such as Qik that Nancy listed in her article The Top 7 Apple iPhone Complaints & Some Simple Solutions, that can be used on the 3G model that provide reasonable video recording capabilities.

Though I can’t vouch for it personally, the iPhone 3GS also has greater performance whereby applications open faster and there’s increased Internet speed. The 3GS also comes with a Compass which “re-orients maps to match the direction you’re facing.”

Advantages and Disadvantages

Perhaps the number one factor in determining which device you should purchase is price. The extra $360-$700 AT&T service fee may be the best reason for not getting the iPhone. If you don’t make many mobile phone calls, the iPod Touch makes for a great mini computer and media player without the monthly service costs of a smartphone.

However, if you’re already paying for a mobile phone service plan, the extra $30 or more a month for 3G access on the iPhone can be very convenient, for it means that in most cities throughout the country you will have Internet access nearly everywhere you go. With the built-in Maps app, 3G networking provides good, but not full fledged, GPS mapping for when you need driving or walking directions.

The additional camera and video recorder may also be worth the extra costs of the iPhone because it means carrying around one or two less devices in order to grab candid camera and video shots. The imaging features on the iPhone also connect with hundreds of additional applications that can’t of course be used with iPod Touch. There are applications, such as the Best Camera App, that really enhance the image making capabilities of the iPhone which Jackson previously showcased in his article The Best Free Alternatives To Top Commercial iPhone Photography Apps.

What’s Your Feedback?

So MUO readers and existing iPhone and iPod Touch users, what suggestions do you have for those considering purchasing one of these devices? Are you a former iPod Touch user who upgraded to the iPhone? Why? Are you an iPhone user who regrets your purchase? Give us your feedback.