Kindle, Kindle, Burning Bright...
Feb. 10th, 2011 11:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexandraerinSo, let's talk about the Kindle. Buying it and not another e-reader was initially a business decision, but I am going to be using it as an e-reader so a review may be in order.
Note that my decision to focus on developing things for the Kindle does not reflect any great love of Amazon as a company. There are things about their existence that I love, but suffice it to say that if you have qualms about their business practices or attitudes towards proprietary content, nothing about the Kindle is so rock solid awesome that you should sit up and take notice.
Also note: I'm specifically talking about the Kindle 3G here.
Size/Weight
This is a big deal to me, because I have a mitochondrial condition and I can't hold weight out from my body for prolonged periods of timeor I'll burn down the house and put John Larroquette into a coma without losing strength in my arms. This includes objects the weight of a typical hardback book, at least over the periods of time that I like to be reading. Older portable electronic devices sometimes gave me this problem, as well. Even a relatively small phone can wear my arm down over the course of a long call.
At the same time, I hate tiny devices. They're so easy to lose, overlook and forget. I'm happy that my new phone is bigger than my old phone (the Pre) was, because one of the reasons I was so slow in replacing the lost Pre was the possibility that I'd just set/dropped it somewhere inside the house.
The Kindle fulfills my needs nicely. It's big enough that I'm not afraid I'll lose it (much, this is me we're talking about) but it's quite light. It was thinner from front to back than I'd pictured... the whole e-ink thing and lack of a backlight and so on probably contributed to that.
The usable area of the screen compares nicely to the size of a paperback novel. It's not quite a "full-sized page", but it's a nice approximation. I can read it comfortably at normal reading distances.
The Screen
One of the best features. E-ink is awesome. I spent waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay to long trying to figure out where the edge of the peely thing was to get the protective screen with the initial instructions on it off before I realized I was just looking at the screen. Things look really sharp and clear on the e-ink screen, whether it's the impressive etching-style pictures that pop up when you put it to sleep or the font on your book or the cool insignia that I took a picture of on using phone's camera. If you saw that on my Facebook, the graininess is all the phone. It's freaking sharp on the Kindle.
The lack of a backlight is hardly an issue at all because the screen is readable in any condition in which paper would be readable, and perhaps a bit more as the Pearl color/texture catches light well. My first attempt at reading in bed with a night light (it's right up by my head and has a switch to turn off, so it makes a decent reading light) was mixed because I waited until I was so tired the letters were moving. I'll give it a proper test tonight.
The refresh rate seems very low, which is both understandable given the underlying technology and not a great encumberance to usefulness. Probably there's somebody somewhere who would hack their Kindle into a Gameboy emulator, but this is not a natural platform for action gaming.
The Mechanical Interface
I miss having a touch-screen when I compare it to my phone, but honestly using finger swipes to page through a book five hundred times is just not great. In reading a hard copy of a book, we learn to ignore the page flipping. Maybe the same thing could happen with having to stop and flick a finger across the screen, but for now it seems like that takes me right out of what I'm reading. The little page-flipping buttons on the edge of the Kindle's screen? Seemed weird to me, but darn if they're not intuitive once you get reading.
I keep wanting them to be lower because I keep wanting to hold it down by the keyboard, but I imagine that reading it for long periods of time, the middle (where the page buttons are) will be a better place to grip. My housemate![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bryirfox got herself a Sony Reader this week and it has the touch screen page-flipping or via a button at the bottom of the screen. This seems better to me. I want any "interface" between me and what I'm reading to be invisible when I'm reading.
The keyboard is where we hit my first actual complaint. I prefer a physical keyboard to a visual one. I'm a skilled enough QWERTY typist that it doesn't matter how small the keys are, I can probably pop out text at about the same rate that you (for a statistically average you) could do so on a real keyboard. You give me a device with a QWERTY keyboard and a way of transmitting written documents and I'm going to write stories on it. The Kindle has a keyboard; it can do Gmail. Knowing this, I figured it would probably replace my keyless phone as my portable handheld thought transcriber.
It took me a while to figure out the typing position. Holding the device like a Gameboy and thumb-typing doesn't work. It's awkward because the keys are to the middle of the device and there are rather wide margins on either side because of the contours of the bottom giving less usable space than is apparent from the top. This is especially true on the right side, where the nav buttons take up a lot extra real estate... you have to reach past them to hit the right hand keys. "N" was the letter I missed most consistely, because of this placement issue. It takes more of a calculator-style grip, with the device held in one hand and my finger gliding over the keyboard. It works. Not as fast as two-handed typing but it works.
Until I need to punctuate. The period is right there. If I want to comma or quote or apostrophe, it takes a minimum of three keystrokes plus a variable number of nav-key pushes: symbol key, [navigate to punctuation mark if necessary], click, symbol key again to get out of it.
So I'm probably mostly going to be writing chunks of narration on it to get me started on longer stories that I'll finish elsedevice, or as bits of flash fiction (shit, I knew I forgot to do something today... the Kindle kind of ate my non-MU time).
If you're not a such a ninja typist that you can bang out a story by tracing a finger over little tiny buttons in the first place, this -might- not be an impediment to you. But I have a feeling that lesser typists will find the keyboard even more frustrating when they try to use it.
The Operating System/Interface
Not great. Some of it's nice and intuitive but the Kindle seems to be built on arbitrary limitations. I can organize my Cat Valente books into a folder, but I can't seem to take my subscriptions to Fantasy In Miniature and Tales of MU and do the same with them. I imagine people with lots of blog subscriptions find this frustrating, or else they know some separate bit of organize-fu that I'm missing. Regardless, it's frustrating to not be able to use one grouping solution for everything.
(Yes, I'm paying to get my own work... but it's more than offset by what others are paying and I'd rather see what they're seeing. The preview function on the Kindle blog publishing site just doesn't isn't very good, and doesn't seem to work on all browsers.)
I understand that this is not a tablet or a computer substitute, but more personalization/customization would be nice. Yes, the screensaver images are very sharp and very cool and will be one of the first things I show off to people who haven't seen a Kindle before. It's a nice bit of branding, that. But people would care more about their Kindles if they could put change out the pictures, keep only their favorites, replace them with their own images. Imagine if when your Kindle goes to sleep it looks like the cover of the Necronomicon Ex Mortis from the Evil Dead movies. Or if you could put the cover of your favorite actual book there. Or a picture of your partner and kids. Or a random picture from your photo album. This would change the Kindle from being a e-reader with a cool picture to my e-reader with my cool pictures.
It would also make it easy to spot yours when there's more than one in a room.
Maybe people have hacked these things already, I don't know. I'm just reviewing the features out of the box.
Sound
The text-to-speech feature is an accessibility feature. This isn't a bad thing, I'm just saying that if you're a sighted reader, don't think of it as a value-add for you, unless you are as entertained as I am by imagining the "you-know-it-lady-friend" superhero guy from the stupid Geico commercial reading Prester John's letter aloud.
The Kindle includes an "experimental" (i.e., incomplete) MP3 player. You can start it. You can stop it. You can advance to the next track. The documentation suggests using it to listen to podcasts, but unless you're planning on copying podcasts over one or two at a time and listening to them individually or putting a bunch of them in a queue and listening straight through, it doesn't seem worth it. I copied some of my all-purpose relaxation music to it, as I won't need to find specific tracks/albums within them, they can make reading more pleasurable, and it's the kind of music I'm most apt to really want/need if I'm caught somewhere and I don't have my netbook with me.
I suppose the limitations make it less likely that people will fill their Kindles up with music and then complain about how small they are, as sound takes up a lot more space than books.
I don't want or need my Kindle to be an iPod, but if I knew it had speakers and it couldn't play music I'd wonder why not, and since it can play music I want it to be more robust. Let me view my files and choose from among them. Let me shuffle. Let me skip pack. Let me repeat a track. Basic stuff. The "experimental" aps have a solicitation for feedback and I intend to let Amazon know that I consider this to be a potential standout feature, if I don't have to carry music separately when I want to take my Kindle down to the beach, or if I can otherwise marry the relaxing pleasure of reading and playing soothing music.
(Sidenote: It's just occurred to me that I should have ordered a waterproof case for this. Ah, well.)
Web Browser
Better than I expected, after all the complaints I've heard but that's not saying much. I think the 3G connection is probably more useful for its ability to give you new content no matter where you go than for making the Kindle into a platform for viewing the web. After having found how easy it is to find, buy, and immediately start reading a book with it vs. how clunky navigating the web is, I no longer wonder how Amazon can afford to offer free lifetime 3G service. They've opened themselves up to accepting impulse buys anywhere you can get a signal.
After checking out Tales of MU's website, I can see why people are willing to pay for the Kindle store feed. By zooming the page in the site becomes fairly legible with the words occupying most of the usable screen real estate, but it's not as clean-looking as reading it in the feed and the interface for scrolling a webpage differs from the one used for paging through reading materials, so you'd have to go back and forth between methods.
The Bottom Line
I think it's a pretty great electronic book reader. It seems to perfectly fulfill my reading needs, and the wireless capabilities is really handy for getting content on. It's nice not to have to fuss around with getting something on my computer and then syncing or downloading to it. I believe my housemate's going to be very happy with her Sony Reader, but this meets my needs better.
In terms of being a "device" in the generic sense, it's not the best one, but that's clearly not what they were going for. It's an e-reader.
Someone suggested to me that whoever wins the e-reader format wars is just going to be blown out of the water by tablet PCs, but I doubt that. I don't want to carry a tablet around. I wouldn't want to take a tablet to the beach or in the bath, even in waterproof bag/case. I want a physical, tangible, tactile keyboard on my computer... and on everything else around me, since I never know where I'll be when inspiration strikes.
Note that my decision to focus on developing things for the Kindle does not reflect any great love of Amazon as a company. There are things about their existence that I love, but suffice it to say that if you have qualms about their business practices or attitudes towards proprietary content, nothing about the Kindle is so rock solid awesome that you should sit up and take notice.
Also note: I'm specifically talking about the Kindle 3G here.
Size/Weight
This is a big deal to me, because I have a mitochondrial condition and I can't hold weight out from my body for prolonged periods of time
At the same time, I hate tiny devices. They're so easy to lose, overlook and forget. I'm happy that my new phone is bigger than my old phone (the Pre) was, because one of the reasons I was so slow in replacing the lost Pre was the possibility that I'd just set/dropped it somewhere inside the house.
The Kindle fulfills my needs nicely. It's big enough that I'm not afraid I'll lose it (much, this is me we're talking about) but it's quite light. It was thinner from front to back than I'd pictured... the whole e-ink thing and lack of a backlight and so on probably contributed to that.
The usable area of the screen compares nicely to the size of a paperback novel. It's not quite a "full-sized page", but it's a nice approximation. I can read it comfortably at normal reading distances.
The Screen
One of the best features. E-ink is awesome. I spent waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay to long trying to figure out where the edge of the peely thing was to get the protective screen with the initial instructions on it off before I realized I was just looking at the screen. Things look really sharp and clear on the e-ink screen, whether it's the impressive etching-style pictures that pop up when you put it to sleep or the font on your book or the cool insignia that I took a picture of on using phone's camera. If you saw that on my Facebook, the graininess is all the phone. It's freaking sharp on the Kindle.
The lack of a backlight is hardly an issue at all because the screen is readable in any condition in which paper would be readable, and perhaps a bit more as the Pearl color/texture catches light well. My first attempt at reading in bed with a night light (it's right up by my head and has a switch to turn off, so it makes a decent reading light) was mixed because I waited until I was so tired the letters were moving. I'll give it a proper test tonight.
The refresh rate seems very low, which is both understandable given the underlying technology and not a great encumberance to usefulness. Probably there's somebody somewhere who would hack their Kindle into a Gameboy emulator, but this is not a natural platform for action gaming.
The Mechanical Interface
I miss having a touch-screen when I compare it to my phone, but honestly using finger swipes to page through a book five hundred times is just not great. In reading a hard copy of a book, we learn to ignore the page flipping. Maybe the same thing could happen with having to stop and flick a finger across the screen, but for now it seems like that takes me right out of what I'm reading. The little page-flipping buttons on the edge of the Kindle's screen? Seemed weird to me, but darn if they're not intuitive once you get reading.
I keep wanting them to be lower because I keep wanting to hold it down by the keyboard, but I imagine that reading it for long periods of time, the middle (where the page buttons are) will be a better place to grip. My housemate
bryirfox got herself a Sony Reader this week and it has the touch screen page-flipping or via a button at the bottom of the screen. This seems better to me. I want any "interface" between me and what I'm reading to be invisible when I'm reading.The keyboard is where we hit my first actual complaint. I prefer a physical keyboard to a visual one. I'm a skilled enough QWERTY typist that it doesn't matter how small the keys are, I can probably pop out text at about the same rate that you (for a statistically average you) could do so on a real keyboard. You give me a device with a QWERTY keyboard and a way of transmitting written documents and I'm going to write stories on it. The Kindle has a keyboard; it can do Gmail. Knowing this, I figured it would probably replace my keyless phone as my portable handheld thought transcriber.
It took me a while to figure out the typing position. Holding the device like a Gameboy and thumb-typing doesn't work. It's awkward because the keys are to the middle of the device and there are rather wide margins on either side because of the contours of the bottom giving less usable space than is apparent from the top. This is especially true on the right side, where the nav buttons take up a lot extra real estate... you have to reach past them to hit the right hand keys. "N" was the letter I missed most consistely, because of this placement issue. It takes more of a calculator-style grip, with the device held in one hand and my finger gliding over the keyboard. It works. Not as fast as two-handed typing but it works.
Until I need to punctuate. The period is right there. If I want to comma or quote or apostrophe, it takes a minimum of three keystrokes plus a variable number of nav-key pushes: symbol key, [navigate to punctuation mark if necessary], click, symbol key again to get out of it.
So I'm probably mostly going to be writing chunks of narration on it to get me started on longer stories that I'll finish elsedevice, or as bits of flash fiction (shit, I knew I forgot to do something today... the Kindle kind of ate my non-MU time).
If you're not a such a ninja typist that you can bang out a story by tracing a finger over little tiny buttons in the first place, this -might- not be an impediment to you. But I have a feeling that lesser typists will find the keyboard even more frustrating when they try to use it.
The Operating System/Interface
Not great. Some of it's nice and intuitive but the Kindle seems to be built on arbitrary limitations. I can organize my Cat Valente books into a folder, but I can't seem to take my subscriptions to Fantasy In Miniature and Tales of MU and do the same with them. I imagine people with lots of blog subscriptions find this frustrating, or else they know some separate bit of organize-fu that I'm missing. Regardless, it's frustrating to not be able to use one grouping solution for everything.
(Yes, I'm paying to get my own work... but it's more than offset by what others are paying and I'd rather see what they're seeing. The preview function on the Kindle blog publishing site just doesn't isn't very good, and doesn't seem to work on all browsers.)
I understand that this is not a tablet or a computer substitute, but more personalization/customization would be nice. Yes, the screensaver images are very sharp and very cool and will be one of the first things I show off to people who haven't seen a Kindle before. It's a nice bit of branding, that. But people would care more about their Kindles if they could put change out the pictures, keep only their favorites, replace them with their own images. Imagine if when your Kindle goes to sleep it looks like the cover of the Necronomicon Ex Mortis from the Evil Dead movies. Or if you could put the cover of your favorite actual book there. Or a picture of your partner and kids. Or a random picture from your photo album. This would change the Kindle from being a e-reader with a cool picture to my e-reader with my cool pictures.
It would also make it easy to spot yours when there's more than one in a room.
Maybe people have hacked these things already, I don't know. I'm just reviewing the features out of the box.
Sound
The text-to-speech feature is an accessibility feature. This isn't a bad thing, I'm just saying that if you're a sighted reader, don't think of it as a value-add for you, unless you are as entertained as I am by imagining the "you-know-it-lady-friend" superhero guy from the stupid Geico commercial reading Prester John's letter aloud.
The Kindle includes an "experimental" (i.e., incomplete) MP3 player. You can start it. You can stop it. You can advance to the next track. The documentation suggests using it to listen to podcasts, but unless you're planning on copying podcasts over one or two at a time and listening to them individually or putting a bunch of them in a queue and listening straight through, it doesn't seem worth it. I copied some of my all-purpose relaxation music to it, as I won't need to find specific tracks/albums within them, they can make reading more pleasurable, and it's the kind of music I'm most apt to really want/need if I'm caught somewhere and I don't have my netbook with me.
I suppose the limitations make it less likely that people will fill their Kindles up with music and then complain about how small they are, as sound takes up a lot more space than books.
I don't want or need my Kindle to be an iPod, but if I knew it had speakers and it couldn't play music I'd wonder why not, and since it can play music I want it to be more robust. Let me view my files and choose from among them. Let me shuffle. Let me skip pack. Let me repeat a track. Basic stuff. The "experimental" aps have a solicitation for feedback and I intend to let Amazon know that I consider this to be a potential standout feature, if I don't have to carry music separately when I want to take my Kindle down to the beach, or if I can otherwise marry the relaxing pleasure of reading and playing soothing music.
(Sidenote: It's just occurred to me that I should have ordered a waterproof case for this. Ah, well.)
Web Browser
Better than I expected, after all the complaints I've heard but that's not saying much. I think the 3G connection is probably more useful for its ability to give you new content no matter where you go than for making the Kindle into a platform for viewing the web. After having found how easy it is to find, buy, and immediately start reading a book with it vs. how clunky navigating the web is, I no longer wonder how Amazon can afford to offer free lifetime 3G service. They've opened themselves up to accepting impulse buys anywhere you can get a signal.
After checking out Tales of MU's website, I can see why people are willing to pay for the Kindle store feed. By zooming the page in the site becomes fairly legible with the words occupying most of the usable screen real estate, but it's not as clean-looking as reading it in the feed and the interface for scrolling a webpage differs from the one used for paging through reading materials, so you'd have to go back and forth between methods.
The Bottom Line
I think it's a pretty great electronic book reader. It seems to perfectly fulfill my reading needs, and the wireless capabilities is really handy for getting content on. It's nice not to have to fuss around with getting something on my computer and then syncing or downloading to it. I believe my housemate's going to be very happy with her Sony Reader, but this meets my needs better.
In terms of being a "device" in the generic sense, it's not the best one, but that's clearly not what they were going for. It's an e-reader.
Someone suggested to me that whoever wins the e-reader format wars is just going to be blown out of the water by tablet PCs, but I doubt that. I don't want to carry a tablet around. I wouldn't want to take a tablet to the beach or in the bath, even in waterproof bag/case. I want a physical, tangible, tactile keyboard on my computer... and on everything else around me, since I never know where I'll be when inspiration strikes.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
on 2011-02-10 10:04 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2011-02-10 10:12 pm (UTC)"Locations 96-100"... am I supposed to be glean useful information from this? I guess it goes up in a similar way to page numbers.
no subject
on 2011-02-10 10:15 pm (UTC)I'm actually running the update right now, because I finally remembered to do it.
no subject
on 2011-02-10 10:18 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2011-02-10 10:20 pm (UTC)ETA: Just in case you miss it in the TL;DR doc, not all Kindle books have had page numbers added yet.
no subject
on 2011-02-10 10:28 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2011-02-10 10:30 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2011-02-10 10:32 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2011-02-10 10:37 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2011-02-10 10:40 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2011-02-10 10:44 pm (UTC)Waterproof case. . .
on 2011-02-11 04:53 am (UTC)How waterproof are those cases? My cousin told me she took hers to the beach in a ziploc bag. . .but that's a lot of trust in a ziploc.
Thoughts?
Re: Waterproof case. . .
on 2011-02-11 05:22 am (UTC)I felt very comfortable taking a bath with it double-bagged (one bag with the zippers at the bottom, and then another bag over that with the zippers at the top, so there's a bigger impediment to any moisture that makes it through the first set of seals, but there's no danger of the weight of the thing making it slip out.
I wouldn't set it down on the edge of the tub for more than a moment... too much could go wrong if it got knocked off in either direction. But it was dry as a bone.