Amazon’s wonderful terrible amazing awful Kindle
dan tynan on Jun 15 2008 at 12:40 pm | Filed under: Gadgets, Reviews
I finally got my hands on a Kindle. Here’s what I like about it — and what needs to be fixed.
The Kindle is amazing and awful, grand and terrible. It’s a groundbreaking device that’s in need of an overhaul. I like it and it annoys me all at the same time. Have I made that clear?
The first thing I noticed about the Kindle is that it’s not as ugly as I expected it to be. Looking at the pictures of it when it was first introduced last November, I thought it looked like an old Texas Instruments desk calculator, circa 1977. In fact it’s smaller and lighter than that, with about the heft of a slim hardcover book.
The second thing I noticed is how easy it is to accidentally hit the Next Page or Previous Page buttons, which flank the screen on either side. Putting it inside the leatherette cover reduces this problem, but you have to remove the thing to turn it on or off or to type anything with two hands, which defeats the purpose of the cover. That’s just dumb engineering. And the cover feels cheap, like reprocessed cardboard. (The Sony Reader cover, on the other hand, feels much more luxurious.)
Memo to Bezos: A nicer leather cover that attached at the back (not fit loosely on the side) would be a step in the right direction. Some space on the side to hold the Kindle without accidentally activating a button would also be a good idea.
What’s cool about the Kindle? A roller button moves the cursor up and down the right side of the page with a narrow slot (“the cursor bar”) that tells you where it is at all times –- very nice. Click the roller button to access menus, which allow you to highlight passages, add notes, look up words in the New American English Dictionary or Wikipedia (pre-loaded on the device), jump around inside each book, and buy new ones from Kindle.
The beauty of the Kindle is that it’s an always-connected device, thanks to “Amazon Whispernet,” a 3G cellular connection provided by Sprint. Without that, it’s just an overpriced eBook reader with a nice display. But my initial experience with the Kindle was as more of an intermittently connected device. In fact, the words I read most often on the Kindle were: “Your Kindle is unable to connect at this time, please try again later.”
A call to Amazon tech support cleared up why I had so much trouble logging on; I was using my old password, not my new one. And instead of prompting me for a different password, as Amazon does online, it simply told me I couldn’t connect and to try again. When I said “boy, that’s really stupid,” the support tech said nothing. But let me just reiterate: boy, that’s really stupid.
Memo to Bezos: Fix the password connection issue. And for Kindle 2.0, add a WiFi option, like the iPhone and the Dash Express GPS do. Most of the time I’ll be using this thing near a hotspot anyway.
The constant connection isn’t about about buying books. You can do that just as easily from your computer, and it’s not something you’re likely to do every day or very often on the road. The connection is about accessing blogs, newspapers, and other content that changes frequently. And here’s another thing that irks me. The Kindle features some 348 blog titles (not this one, of course). But to get to any of them you have to sign up for a subscription at $1 to $2 a month. You don’t get to read the blogs without signing up (though you can cancel during first 14 days and not get charged –- good luck remembering to do that). In other words, the same stuff you read for free every day on your computer will cost you money to read on the Kindle.
Of course, on the positive side, the blogs are presented in a much more readable book-like form, with a miniature table of contents and without ads. But it still irks me to pay $2 a month to read TechCrunch or $4 to read Salon. The Kindle has a Basic Browser that allows you to access these same sites for free, minus the formatting and with ads mostly intact. Amazon does its best to hide that fact, however. You won’t find the browser listed in any menu on the device; I found it by accident while pursuing a link inside a Salon story. The browser doesn’t support video or Flash, and it only displays in black and white.
Memo to Bezos: Consider including a more “robust” browser in Kindle 2.0 and making it accessible via a single button on the keypad.
There are mechanical problems as well. The Kindle’s processor is inexplicably slow. It literally takes one second for each character to appear on screen as I type. The QWERTY keypad is also funky –- the keys are nicely spaced but they feel sticky, and the tactile feedback sucks. Worse, there are no directional keys, only a backspace-delete. To move back and forth on a line you need to press Alt-J or Alt-H –- not exactly intuitive.
Memo to Bezos: Fix the keyboard and upgrade the processor.
I admit that I am slightly prejudiced toward the Sony Reader, which uses the same brilliant page display technology as the Kindle (and did it two years earlier). I like the Sony’s form factor better – it doesn’t have a keyboard, so the screen is slightly larger, it has a leather cover, and, frankly, it simply feels more like a book than a “device.”
The Kindle’s interface is also not as intuitive. I had to hunt around for the zoom button to magnify the text (hey, I’m old, so what). Instead of a cursor wheel, Sony simply has numeric buttons down the side that correspond to menu items. It’s a bit horsy, but it’s dead simple to use. With the Kindle, it really helps to read the on-screen manual first. That may seem academic to you geeks out there, but I have a firm rule about gadgets: if you have to read the manual to figure out basic features, there’s something wrong.
Memo to Bezos: About the price. I know Amazon just slashed it last month from $399 to $359, but really $299 or even $249 is a better call. Or maybe the cell phone model makes more sense — $99 with a $20 to $40 service plan that allows for unlimited content. Otherwise, Steve Jobs will steal all your lunch money by adding a bookstore to iTunes and an eBook reader to the iPhone. And why should Apple fanboys have all the fun?
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