gadgets

I bought a Kindle about a year ago. I loved it from the start. Its screen is just about perfect for reading. Sunlight is no problem whatsoever. You can easily keep reading for hours and hours without your eyes getting tired. It's so light that you can hold it in pretty much every way imaginable without it becoming uncomfortable. The process of buying ebooks on Amazon and getting them delivered on the device automatically is just great. The process of buying ebooks from other stores and uploading them to your Kindle is smooth enough, provided that you buy the books in the Mobi format. The battery life still impresses me, even though it's almost a year old.

I also bought an iPad 2 as soon as it came out. I didn't buy it thinking it could replace my Kindle. I bought it because I thought I'd prefer using it over my Macbook for the times when I just want to consume web-content, instead of actually working on something. If I want to work on something, I use the Macbook. For entertainment, the iPad is more often used because of its superior form factor and ease of use. After a while, you sort of get spoiled by the iPad and its interface. I now expect to be able to use my fingers when I see a small screen without a keyboard attached to it. The auto-rotating screen has also become a must-have to me. The fact that I can quickly switch between apps, without being visually distracted by them, is something that I absolutely love. And I expect everything to just happen instantly whenever I trigger something.

Simply put: the iPad has spoiled me so much, that I now sort of dislike using my Kindle. I know the Kindle screen is easier on the eyes for long reading sessions. I know that reading in daylight is much better on the Kindle than on the iPad. I also know that I really dislike navigating using the Kindle controls. I hate switching between portrait and landscape mode on the Kindle. I hate that everything I do makes me wait, even if it's only half a second. And I really don't like the fact that I've caught myself switching between both devices to check Twitter or email. So a while ago, I installed the Kindle app on my iPad and tried it for a while. I haven't used my Kindle since. That's not to say that I no longer think that the Kindle is a good device. In fact, for its price I think it's a great device. But it really just loses a lot of its attraction once you're used to an iPad.

For Amazon's sake, I hope the rumors about the Kindle tablet are all true. I think they're going to need to go in the tablet direction if they want the Kindle brand to remain relevant over the next couple of years. I do wonder what that's going to mean for the future of e-ink though.

Note: I actually wrote this post on my iPad, using IA Writer. It's the first time I'm writing a post on the iPad, and it's unlikely to be the last.

I ordered a Kindle 3 (WiFi only) on September 8th, and it was delivered last week, on September 22th. I've only had it for 4 days now, but i think i've done enough reading with it already to write a review of it. When i took it out of the packaging i was immediately impressed with its size. It really is that small and thin, though it's not too small or too thin. Its weight is ideal as well. Because of its ideal size and weight, you can easily and comfortably hold it for hours on end:

As you may have noticed from this picture (click on it to see it in its full size), the screen is really the killer feature of the Kindle. Text is crystal-clear, and remains that way even if you change your viewing angle:

Even when looking at it from the side, the text is still as clear as it would be on actual paper:

Most importantly, the impact of direct light on the screen is minimal. In the following picture, the camera flash was directed straight at the screen and IMO, the impact of it is minimal:

No matter what kind of light exposure you're dealing with while reading, tilting the Kindle slightly always leads to a fantastic reading experience. That is, as long as there is some kind of light. The screen itself doesn't emit any light so you can forget about reading in the dark. The clearness of the text and the fact that the screen doesn't emit any light are probably the 2 most important reasons why i like reading on the Kindle so much. You can simply keep reading for hours without your eyes getting tired. I had one stint where i read continuously for 5 hours and didn't notice any discomfort whatsoever. My eyes still felt great after those 5 hours, and because of its form factor, i could sit or lie on the couch in whatever manner i wanted to without the physical shape of the book constraining me in any way, sometimes simply by balancing the device with just one finger.

The only thing i'm not thrilled about when it comes to the form factor of the device is the location of the next/previous page buttons. They're located on both sides of the device, and while that is indeed useful depending on how you're holding it and what kind of position you're in at the time, it also caused me to press those buttons accidentally quite frequently in my first few hours of reading. By now, i'm used to avoiding those buttons unless i actually want to switch to another page, but in the beginning it was a bit frustrating though. Obviously, this is just a very minor complaint and for those who also have difficulty with this in the beginning, it'll only be for a few hours.

The battery also appears to be great... I've only used the device for 4 days, and even though i've used it a lot, i still have over 75% of battery life left out of a single charge. Obviously, the wonderful e-ink screen is the reason for this since it only consumes power while you're switching pages but once a page is displayed, it uses no more power whatsoever. Your battery usage will obviously vary on how often you use the wireless connection, or the 3G connectivity for those who've bought that edition.

So far for the great things about the device... now it's time to focus on some of the things that aren't quite great. First of all, reading PDF's really is a hit-or-miss experience from file to file. I only tried about 10 different PDF books, and none of them were displayed good enough to read them in portrait mode. In landscape mode, some of them looked good enough to read, while others are just acceptable. In those cases, i'm quite sure i can't keep reading them for hours and hours like i can with books in the native Kindle format. Converting them to MOBI format or having Amazon convert them to Kindle format leads to mixed results. While the actual text was then displayed almost as good as native Kindle books, you lose quite a bit of the formatting which is especially detrimental for programming books... code samples will lose most, if not all, of their indentation and become a pain to read.

As for technical books in the Kindle format, i haven't bought any of those yet, but i did try a few sample chapters of a few technical books, including ones that were listed as optimized for the larger Kindle DX screen. I found every sample to be of high quality (visually speaking) and am looking forward to reading all of my technical books on the Kindle from now on. In fact, i'm not really looking forward to finishing a few physical books i bought recently before ordering the Kindle. It would be cool if Amazon would offer free Kindle editions of physical books you've bought with them, but i don't see that happening since that would mostly be of major benefit to the consumer and publishers don't really seem to care about that.

Which brings me to my next complaint: why on earth is the price difference between Kindle editions of books and physical editions so small? In many cases, the difference is merely a few dollars. While i assume that Amazon takes a nice share of the profit for every electronic book purchase, i can't for the life of me imagine that that amount is comparable to the extra cost of producing and shipping physical books. The price difference should be bigger, given the fact that the cost of distributing electronic books can never even come close to the cost of producing and shipping physical books and let's not forget the positive impact on the environment of not having to waste all that extra paper. Surely, that ought to be worth something?

Another thing that's worth nothing is that the software of the Kindle feels very dated, and is somewhat clumsy to use. It's certainly not a big issue since the reading experience more than makes up for it, but every time i have to interact with the software i feel like i'm back in the 90's. Navigating the menu items or options with the '5-way' control, or navigating in the Kindle store is far from a great experience and it does occasionally make me sigh. Flipping through a bunch of pages is also a weird experience because it often makes me think "is it waiting for me to do something or am i still waiting for it to do something?". Finally, the included keyboard is so small that i doubt that you'll make heavy use of the annotations feature with this device. For me that's not an issue since the annotations feature doesn't interest me, but i can imagine that it would disappoint people who've bought it with the intention of making great use of that feature.

Now, despite some of the negative things i just mentioned, i'm still very impressed with this device, and i look forward to watching it improve in the editions that we'll hopefully see in the next couple of years. The reading experience more than makes up for any other shortcoming that you might find with it, and you can't argue with the price either. Amazon charged me 158 euros for it (which included shipping costs plus customs fees) which i think is a fantastic deal (well apart from the customs fees obviously, which i've always considered to be a rip-off). I was at an electronics store yesterday and strolled by their selection of e-readers from a variety of brands, and none of them impressed me after having used this. Even worse, pretty much every single device that i saw in that store was more expensive, looked more clumsy and had a screen that wasn't nearly as impressive as the Kindle's.

In short: if you're looking to buy an e-reader: get this Kindle. Odds are that you'll love it as well, and in the small chance that you don't: you'll have no problem selling it off to someone else who will.