Sony Reader problems

My Sony Reader is the PRS-500 model, a couple of years old now. I was enticed by Sony into sending it in for a firmware upgrade so that it would read epub books as well as the other formats and since the Sony book store will soon only sell epub books, I didn't have much choice.

Big mistake. I got it back in under two weeks and had very high hopes since you'd expect an upgrade big enough to require you to physically send in the reader would be terrific. It was but in a bad way. Books that used to load in seconds now require up to 15 minutes and even changing the font size, which used to be very fast, now takes 10-15 minutes and often requires a reset. Some books that the Sony library software shows as 300-400k/bytes only show a single error page on the reader, even though they appear to transfer correctly. Without error messages at least.

This is obviously very disappointing and I'm left thinking that it may not be accidental. Do they want me to trade-in the 500 for a newer model so badly that they'd cripple an otherwise working model? I hate to think so but it's hard to believe anyone would put up with a reader that became so inefficient after a major upgrade to it's firmware. Maybe they did something wrong that can be corrected and I'll contact them to see what they'll do. All I know is this is my last Sony product, reader or otherwise, until I'm satisfied.

A search didn't show many people with this same problem but a lot have complaints about the screen breaking, either from pushing the reset button or from pushing the unit back into it's case after cleaning it or pushing the reset. That doesn't inspire much confidence and neither does the fact that nobody at their CS speaks English as a first language, according to many posts. I've dealt with companies that have "techs" read from a script that only covers a few points and then they either hang up on you or put you on hold indefinitely. I won't jump fully to any conclusions but I'm already very leery of Sony and it's alleged firmware upgrade. My reader used to work great and now it's too crippled to be used at all.