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ISBS Review: The Amazon Kindle
By Brian | December 27, 2009 | Share on Facebook
I realize that this probably would have been more useful before Christmas, but I’ve been using the Amazon Kindle for about a month now, and I’ve finally found the time to write up a review. So, if you didn’t get one for Christmas and you’ve got stuff to return at Amazon, maybe this will help you out.
One sentence: The Amazon Kindle is surprisingly good at what it does, but surprisingly stubborn in its desire to only do that one thing.
More than one sentence: When I read a book on the Amazon Kindle, I quite often forget that I’m not reading a real book, sometimes to the point where I reach for the upper-right corner of the page to turn it, rather than pushing the “Next Page” button. Reasons for this include screen resolution, form factor and simple design.
The text on the Kindle’s screen is not back-lit like a computer monitor or a PDA. Instead, it’s actual lines drawn on the screen each time a page is rendered – kind of like the old Etch-a-Sketch toys we played with as kids, only much clearer and immune to shaking. How clear is the image? When I first took the Amazon Kindle out of the box, the screen had an Amazon logo on it and a message that said “Welcome to Kindle.” I immediately began picking at one of the corners of the device, trying to peel off what I assumed was a clear, plastic overlay with a logo printed on it. Luckily, before I damaged my new toy, I realized that the logo was on the screen itself. With that kind of resolution, you could read War and Peace on this thing and never have your eyes go tired (well, not from the Kindle, anyway…)
The device’s form factor also pleasantly surprised me, although I think it might be because I got my Kindle with a leather cover, which opens just like a book. So now, when I read, I hold the cover just like I would a real book, except that instead of pages in between, it’s just the one electronic device. I would highly recommend the extra $30 for this cover, especially for those who are concerned that the Kindle would take away that “curl up with a good book on a peaceful Sunday morning” feeling. Without it, I think it would feel more like a Star-Trek style tablet computer, which would definitely lessen the experience.
And finally, there’s the extremely simple design. More than half of the device’s surface is covered by the screen. The six buttons – Next Page (one on each side), Previous Page (unfortunately, only on the left side), Home, Menu and Back (right side only) are thin, recessed into the device so that they don’t stick up from the surface at all, and even have white-on-white coloring to make them blend in as much as possible. Even the keyboard and the small joystick at the bottom of the device are small and white-on-white to encourage blending. What does this all mean? It means that when you read, you can lose yourself in the story you’re reading, rather than being distracted by all the gadgets surrounding the words.
Kindle strives to be as much like a book as possible. And in this area, it succeeds surprisingly well.
But this is a sleek-looking, $260 gadget that exists in an iPhone-enabled world, so I’d be lying to you if I didn’t admit that I went looking for other functions almost immediately. Here, I was, however unfairly, disappointed. There’s the ability to play music (MP3 files) while you read, but the controls are so clunky and the features so minimal that it wouldn’t even dream of being an iPod killer. There’s a very, very basic web browser, but it’s really only for browsing the Kindle store. Yes, you can go to any other website, but anything but the most basic page is going to be poorly rendered (the browser doesn’t support CSS, for example) and/or hard to navigate (since there’s no mouse, you have to move link by link down the page using the joystick).
Predictably, the book-related features are a little more interesting, but still clunky. There’s text-to-speech (enabled only for those authors who allow it, which so far has been all of them for me, but I’ve read that some do not). Readers with poor eyesight can increase the size of the text. Also, you can use the joystick to navigate (line-by-line and word-by-word) to a word you don’t recognize, and a dictionary definition will appear at the bottom of the screen. Click on the “more” link from there, and it will open a dictionary (included as a free book) to the word’s entry for more information. You can also set bookmarks and make annotations, although navigating back through your bookmarks (like all joystick-based navigation) is difficult, and the small keyboard, while fine for searching the Kindle store for new books, makes it difficult at best to write anything more than the shortest of notes.
The only impressive “tech” feature of the Kindle is its connectivity, both wireless and when plugged into a computer. Over the years, I’ve had a few eReader applications on various portable devices (anyone remember the Palm Pilot?), and so I’ve collected about two dozen eBooks, ranging in file formats from .prc (a common
Topics: ISBS Reviews, Tech Talk | 2 Comments »
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