I’ve had but a few scant hours to play with Sony’s Newly Announced Reader PRS-700 and while I do plan on giving it the full review treatment in the near future, for those who just can’t wait here’s my hands-on impressions of the eBook reader’s most exciting enhancements, its touchscreen controls, reading lights, and text alteration features.

With the PRS-700 Sony has focused on adding new enhancements and value features rather than fixes or changes to their previous model, the PRS-505S which I think achieved everything it had set out to do.

The screen looks the same as with previous Sony Reader models except that it can except commands through the pressure of touch. Once you adjust to the amount of pressure needed (not too much), the screen is very responsive and changes from menu option to menu option very quickly. You don’t really need the included stylus, the on-screen commands are large enough, but the stylus they have included is a nice one made out of steel rather than plastic and the built-in holder on the corner of device looks fairly secure.

The touchscreen display is built for single touch commands only, but you can perform swipes across the screen to flip pages or highlight text. You can change the settings to change the direction of your swipes, to allow for both left-handed and right-handed page turning. Highlighting text is fairly easy to use and use accurately, to select only the words you need.

The trick with touchscreen displays is that they have to be useful, not merely a gimmick added to cash in on the trend started by Apple’s iPhone. Here it genuinely adds to the ease of the Reader’s use and makes reading and navigating through a book’s pages more pleasurable.

The virtual keyboard is well-spaced out and since it will only be used for perform keyword-based searches and making annotations, works very well for the limited demands made of it. Searches are instantaneous and, just like performing a search in Microsoft Word, highlights every matching word and lets you quickly jump from one result to the next.

While it’s a bonus to have five text sizes to choose from, the zoom mode is the real value as the touchscreen-based slider gives you the precision needed to zoom in at the exact level of magnification wanted.

The ability to change screen orientation is another welcome bonus. I’ve yet to figure out if the device has the ability to automatically detect when its being held a different way, there are times when that seems to be the case, the option to change from portrait to landscape mode will occasionally appear when I’ve opened the device, but I’m not yet certain. Either way, the change is very quick, there’s no waiting for it to reformat the book, and the option to hold the book and read it from a different angle is, for people who like myself tend to read from different positions, a great boon.

The reading light is more useful than I thought. Small, LED lights built into the frame outside of the screen can be turned on to cast light onto it from the edges. You get a series of bright lights at the edge of the screen which quickly fades towards the middle of the page. When I first saw this, I flashed back to the Worm add-in lights that were issued for the Game Boy Advances that didn’t work very well. Here the illumination, which has two settings of brightness, actually works quite well in a darkened room. It isn’t enough for complete darkness, but for reading in bed or in a room with few lamps, it works far, far better than I imagined.

From what I’ve seen today, Sony has taken an already well-designed product and given it some much-appreciated enhancements that make eBook reading that much more of an attractive pursuit.