Kindle Wireless Reading Device (6" Display, U.S. Wireless)
First, the screen. The contrast is poor. The text is black on gray. Worse than pretty much any physical book you can find. And the bright white exterior continually reminds you about just how "not white" the screen background is. It's probably OK when there's a lot of light behind you, but reading in a somewhat dimly lit room is no fun. THe screen also "ghosts" like crazy -- leaving little trails from the previous screen. Also, not having a touch screen is a bummer. The UI begs for to be a touch screen, with round buttons everywhere, but instead you have to move a little nub around in 4 directions until you get to the button you want. Because of this, adding notes or pretty much any other kind of navigation is really clunky. Reminds me of using Windows 3.0 before mice were readily available. I miss page numbers. In Kindle land it's "locations" and a book will easily have thousands of them! It's pretty daunting to know I've got 12,236 locations to go! The books aren't that much cheaper. I'm struggling to reason what makes a Kindle book much better than a physical one. Sure, you can get it immediately, and there's a dictionary built in. But I'm not sure I can't look up a word faster on my iphone... Finally, these days I find time to read in random bursts -- e.g, take a book with me to the park while the kids are playing or at gymnastics. Not a great spot/situation for a $300+ device that's too big to fit in your pocket in case you need to get up and leave for a minute. And I'm not excited to bring a $300+ device into my "other office" either. I know the iPhone screen is smaller, but I already take it with me everywhere and it fits neatly in my pocket. And the screen is nice, bright, and clear. Not ideal, but in most other ways better than the Kindle2. And now that there's a Kindle App for the iPhone, I see even less reason for the Kindle device... but then again, that's probably just fine with Amazon as long as I keep buying ebooks...
comments
I have never see this device and I will admit I am a bit intrigued by it. Just one comment about the UI and page numbers. About 16 yrs ago when Roy and I were learning from MS Office luminaries in Redmond, I remember having a conversation with one of the [arguably] fathers of modern MS Word, Kornel Marton. He claimed that the whole concept of the "page" was an artifact of the printed world, sort of an artificial container that did not really translate into the electronic medium. He said that the "biggest" container they created in Word was the "section", which could have its own attributes, but that you would probably would not want to target a specific page to display something unless you wanted to print it. So, the question for the makers of this device would probably be whether they intended to mimic the actual "look and feel" of the book, in which case page layout, including numbers, would need to be the same, or they actually wanted to extract the book content and present it in a digital interface, where there is an uninterrupted flow of text. Sorry for the geeky diatribe guys :-) but I have been using my blackberry a lot to read news lately, and I've been wondering about the limitations of a small screen when you want to read more than a few paragraphs. I was at Costco this morning and saw a tiny netbook for $294 with a very clear 10" display. I do now own a piece of clothing with a pocket big enough for it, but I kind of thought that it was small and light enough to carry around and big enough to comfortably browse the web and read news. I think I could read a book in that screen. Now, has anybody seen a tablet PC that small? Wouldn't a < $300 unit with an 10" screen be a killer? Probably just a matter of time. Cheers, -Jorge
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