I picked up a Kindle E-Book Reader from Amazon, which arrived today. I'm pretty impressed with it! If you haven't heard about it, the Kindle is an electronic book reader from Amazon. It goes for $399 and includes the device, a lifetime cellular Internet connection subscription, and a small discount off nearly every book available electronically. Right now Amazon has over 80,000 books converted and are planning on putting their entire bookstore into digital format.
The Kindle offers several neat features. First, it has an E-Ink screen. This sets it apart from a computer screen because it doesn't require backlighting - much easier on your eyes for reading for long periods of time. Second, it has a built-in EV-DO chip for wireless access to the Kindle bookstore anywhere you take it. No wifi connection or computer connection required, although it does have a USB port if you want to transfer your own content. Third, you can purchase books instantly on the device via the wireless connection - books only take 60 seconds to download and you can buy them using Amazon's 1-Click technology. So basically, with the Kindle you can buy books anywhere you are, take your entirely library with you, and your eyes won't melt from starting at a computer-like screen all day because it uses E-Ink.
The E-Ink screen is fabulous. It looks really amazing - I've never seen an E-Ink screen before and I'm very impressed by it. I believe it has 4 levels of gray; the screen itself is a light gray while the text is a dark gray, not black. I believe this makes it easier on your eyes than regular books - it seems like less of a strain on mine at least. It displays pictures pretty well, not in color of course, but you can see graphics like book covers just fine. Since it's targeted to being a book replacement and most books are printed in black ink, I don't see the lack of color being a drawback.
The wireless connection is excellent. Even inside my house I get plenty of bars. There's a switch on the back to turn it on and off - you get about 30 hours of reading time with the wireless on and about a week of reading time with the wireless off. It's just a simple switch on the back, next to the on/off switch. Downloads are extremely fast; by the time you navigate back from to the home page from the store, your download is usually done. They don't have all the titles available yet, but they do have 100 or so out of the 112 books on the New York Times bestseller list, so you have access to plenty of content. Oh and McGraw-Hill said that their textbooks are 55% cheaper than print books, which is great if you're a student like me.
I really like the concept of being able to carry the Kindle and take your entire library with you. It stores 200 books in the onboard memory; I got a 2GB SD card which holds 2,300 books. It can also hold MP3 files, Audiobooks, as well as subscriptions to newspaper, magazines, and blogs. You can import your own content, although you have to convert it first using either Amazon's service or a free software application from Mobi if you want to convert PDFs. You can also email stuff to your Kindle, but they charge you 10 cents per email, so you might as well just use the USB cable and do it for free. It does have a basic web browser as well.
In addition to displaying books, you can also bookmark pages, search through the book for specific words, lookup all the words on a line in your book on the onboard dictionary, and even search Wikipedia. You can also highlight lines and take notes using the onboard keyboard, although the letters lag a little behind your typing (not sure if that's the processor or the E-Ink technology at work).
There are a few big drawbacks. The biggest is the button placement. There are large buttons on each side of the device to flip through pages. These are great and very handy, but make it difficult to hold the way I would hold a normal book. You have to hold it gently in order not to press a button, or hold it more towards the bottom. That's not the way I'm used to holding a book and it's very annoying. Maybe to the point of returning it, I'm not sure yet. I'll need to read a book or two to see if I can adjust to it. The Kindle itself is very lightweight as well as cool-running and noiseless, so it's not like adjusting my "holding" style is a huge issue, but it is annoying nonetheless. There's also no landscape mode - when you hold a book normally, you have both the left and the right pages open and it's "widescreen" in a sense. When I hold the Kindle horizontally, it is much more comfortable to hold, but again it doesn't have a landscape mode (the Sony E-Book Reader does!).
My other gripes are fairly small. First, the screen does get a dull glare from light sources. This is easily remedied by angling it just a bit away so that the glare goes away, but my paper books don't get any glare. Second, it's white. It's already dirty and I haven't even had it for a whole day. Why not black or another dark color? Third, it's ugly. Yes, it looks better in person, but it's no Apple product. Luckily it's just an e-book reader and not something that necessarily needs to look "sexy", if you know what I mean. It's just an electronic book reading device, so I can overlook the aesthetic design.
Other than the large, annoying-to-hold-it-easily buttons on both sides, it's a fairly intuitive and seamless experience. It's really cool being able to store my books on it and not have to stare at a bright computer screen. I can only handle reading PDFs and other long documents on a computer screen so long before my eyes bug out, so the E-Ink technology is a real blessing. Would I recommend this to normal people? I would say wait for revision 2. If you're a gadget junkie and avid book reader like me and can overlook the button design, then I'd say go for it. It seems to be an excellent product if you can adapt to the weird button placement. Oh, and the keyboard stays completely out of the way. I thought the keyboard would be a problem but it's not a problem in the least.
Anyway, just wanted to share! I think that E-Book Readers are the wave of the future and this is one of the major milestones towards that future. Sony has had their E-Book Reader out for a long time, but Amazon is the one who is really going to move things forward because they have the world's largest library behind them - Sony only has a 1/4th of the content that Amazon has, and Amazon is just getting started. I'm not 100% sure that I will be keeping mine, but I will definitely be keeping an eye out for version 2.0. Cheers!
The Kindle offers several neat features. First, it has an E-Ink screen. This sets it apart from a computer screen because it doesn't require backlighting - much easier on your eyes for reading for long periods of time. Second, it has a built-in EV-DO chip for wireless access to the Kindle bookstore anywhere you take it. No wifi connection or computer connection required, although it does have a USB port if you want to transfer your own content. Third, you can purchase books instantly on the device via the wireless connection - books only take 60 seconds to download and you can buy them using Amazon's 1-Click technology. So basically, with the Kindle you can buy books anywhere you are, take your entirely library with you, and your eyes won't melt from starting at a computer-like screen all day because it uses E-Ink.
The E-Ink screen is fabulous. It looks really amazing - I've never seen an E-Ink screen before and I'm very impressed by it. I believe it has 4 levels of gray; the screen itself is a light gray while the text is a dark gray, not black. I believe this makes it easier on your eyes than regular books - it seems like less of a strain on mine at least. It displays pictures pretty well, not in color of course, but you can see graphics like book covers just fine. Since it's targeted to being a book replacement and most books are printed in black ink, I don't see the lack of color being a drawback.
The wireless connection is excellent. Even inside my house I get plenty of bars. There's a switch on the back to turn it on and off - you get about 30 hours of reading time with the wireless on and about a week of reading time with the wireless off. It's just a simple switch on the back, next to the on/off switch. Downloads are extremely fast; by the time you navigate back from to the home page from the store, your download is usually done. They don't have all the titles available yet, but they do have 100 or so out of the 112 books on the New York Times bestseller list, so you have access to plenty of content. Oh and McGraw-Hill said that their textbooks are 55% cheaper than print books, which is great if you're a student like me.
I really like the concept of being able to carry the Kindle and take your entire library with you. It stores 200 books in the onboard memory; I got a 2GB SD card which holds 2,300 books. It can also hold MP3 files, Audiobooks, as well as subscriptions to newspaper, magazines, and blogs. You can import your own content, although you have to convert it first using either Amazon's service or a free software application from Mobi if you want to convert PDFs. You can also email stuff to your Kindle, but they charge you 10 cents per email, so you might as well just use the USB cable and do it for free. It does have a basic web browser as well.
In addition to displaying books, you can also bookmark pages, search through the book for specific words, lookup all the words on a line in your book on the onboard dictionary, and even search Wikipedia. You can also highlight lines and take notes using the onboard keyboard, although the letters lag a little behind your typing (not sure if that's the processor or the E-Ink technology at work).
There are a few big drawbacks. The biggest is the button placement. There are large buttons on each side of the device to flip through pages. These are great and very handy, but make it difficult to hold the way I would hold a normal book. You have to hold it gently in order not to press a button, or hold it more towards the bottom. That's not the way I'm used to holding a book and it's very annoying. Maybe to the point of returning it, I'm not sure yet. I'll need to read a book or two to see if I can adjust to it. The Kindle itself is very lightweight as well as cool-running and noiseless, so it's not like adjusting my "holding" style is a huge issue, but it is annoying nonetheless. There's also no landscape mode - when you hold a book normally, you have both the left and the right pages open and it's "widescreen" in a sense. When I hold the Kindle horizontally, it is much more comfortable to hold, but again it doesn't have a landscape mode (the Sony E-Book Reader does!).
My other gripes are fairly small. First, the screen does get a dull glare from light sources. This is easily remedied by angling it just a bit away so that the glare goes away, but my paper books don't get any glare. Second, it's white. It's already dirty and I haven't even had it for a whole day. Why not black or another dark color? Third, it's ugly. Yes, it looks better in person, but it's no Apple product. Luckily it's just an e-book reader and not something that necessarily needs to look "sexy", if you know what I mean. It's just an electronic book reading device, so I can overlook the aesthetic design.
Other than the large, annoying-to-hold-it-easily buttons on both sides, it's a fairly intuitive and seamless experience. It's really cool being able to store my books on it and not have to stare at a bright computer screen. I can only handle reading PDFs and other long documents on a computer screen so long before my eyes bug out, so the E-Ink technology is a real blessing. Would I recommend this to normal people? I would say wait for revision 2. If you're a gadget junkie and avid book reader like me and can overlook the button design, then I'd say go for it. It seems to be an excellent product if you can adapt to the weird button placement. Oh, and the keyboard stays completely out of the way. I thought the keyboard would be a problem but it's not a problem in the least.
Anyway, just wanted to share! I think that E-Book Readers are the wave of the future and this is one of the major milestones towards that future. Sony has had their E-Book Reader out for a long time, but Amazon is the one who is really going to move things forward because they have the world's largest library behind them - Sony only has a 1/4th of the content that Amazon has, and Amazon is just getting started. I'm not 100% sure that I will be keeping mine, but I will definitely be keeping an eye out for version 2.0. Cheers!
There's a headset jack and volume buttons on the bottom. You can also play unencrypted MP3s on it.
