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Hands-On With The Kindle
Amazon's Kindle e-book may have sold out in record time, but there's still a lot of discussion about the device's merits. Neil Gaiman likes it well enough, but it's sent Robert Scoble into a fit of apoplectic rage. For a real, meaty, hands-on look at the way the device operates in everyday life, Gamers With Jobs writer Julian Murdoch has a slice of life with the Kindle. He takes us through his Thanksgiving holiday weekend with the device, noting the quirks (good and bad) that cropped up with Amazon's new toy. "Short of reading in the tub, the Kindle is easier to read in more places, positions, and situations than a physical book ... But it's far from perfect. It is expensive. The cover, which I find completely necessary, is in desperate need of more secure attachment (Velcro works great). The book selection is less-than-perfect, although I imagine this will improve with every passing day. And Amazon needs marketing help. The Kindle's launch reeked of 'get it out fast.' The big-picture marketing efforts (like video demonstrations and blurbs from authors) were great, but simple things like communicating how freakin' easy it is to get non-Amazon content on to the device, for free, remain horribly misunderstood."
Drop the price: agreed. $40 is fair.
Make it less ugly? I dunno, it looks good to me.
Slideable keyboard? Not sure. I hate the idea of a keyboard in the first place. The review aptly
demonstrated why. They guy could not solve his crossword puzzles from the downloaded newspaper.
Case closed. Stylus and touchscreen please.
Content separate from device? My initial impression was also that Amazon will lock this but it now
sounds like Kindle is quite open. If the review is correct and the Kindle just looks like a hard
drive when hooked up via USB then this is perfect. I think Amazon screwed up on marketing by not
making this clear. This also makes format conversion issues largely ignorable. Of course, I do not
mind the converter nearly as much as you seem to.
Notes... Ah yes. Again, stylus and touchscreen please. No way notes will be easy to do with keyboard.
Fermat's predicament should not happen ever again.
Search? This is one of many things that we could do ourselves. Just open the code to Kindle (Is this
already done? Amazon is not very good at promoting key aspects it seems.) We could also fix the
apparently limited web browser. Does anyone already work on porting Firefox to Kindle?
One thing you do not mention but I will (I did previously when Kindle just came out): color screen is a
must. Especially for textbooks, manuals, maps, etc. Any technical literature crams a lot of info into
small figures by using color. All reviews I have seen involve reading plain text. But for professionals
and college students this thing will be largely useless. And that is not a small part of the book market.