Kindle, oh Kindle
Somehow I was one of the lucky few to get one of the precious Kindles before Christmas. After using it for a couple of months now, I am finally ready to provide my feedback on it.
The week before the Kindle was announced I picked up the Sony Reader and had gotten a feel for what an e-Ink reader was capable of achieving. I was a little hesitant at first about getting another book reader so soon but after seeing the amount of titles available in the Amazon store I was ready to plop down another $400. When the Kindle launched it had over 88,000 books available. The Sony store only had about 22,000. Amazon had a familiar and intuitive interface. The Sony was painful to use. Amazon is compatible with any OS and the Sony is Windows only. As an added bonus, the prices on Amazon seem slightly lower than Sony. These prices are usually always lower than the price of a physical copy of the book.
I didn’t place my order instantaneously, but after an article came out touting the virtues of the Kindle, I became convinced. Somehow, my Kindle was miraculously shipped the next day. (I like to think that all my years of devotion to Amazon and Amazon Prime had something to do with it. Alas it was not so. An order placed the next week did not ship before Christmas.)
To begin with, the Kindle arrived in a beautiful package shaped to resemble a book. Compared to the plain old packaging of the Sony Reader, this was a nice pleasant touch. The package included a nice leather cover and elastic strap to hold the Kindle within. Unlike the cover on the Sony, the Kindle could be easily inserted and removed from the cover. The leather itself was much softer.
The presence of a power button on the Kindle elicited a sigh of relief. I never could tell when the Sony device was actually off. Sometimes, even though I thought the Sony was off, it still drained the battery. The Kindle removed this worry.
The grip on the back of the Kindle was also must appreciated. The Sony had a tendency to slip from my hands and was very cold feeling. The grip on the Kindle solved these issues.
The page flip buttons on the Sony are awkwardly placed and are not very responsive. In contrast, the Kindle’s buttons are easily within reach and you can easily tell when they have been pushed. (Of course these buttons also become easier to accidentally push.) The one area were I feel the Sony actually beats the Kindle is in the open space on the bottom of the device. The Kindle’s full keyboard will hinder grasping the device at times and, so far, it has gotten little use from me. I would have much rather have had empty space for adjusting my grip.
It terms of the display, both the Kindle and the Sony are using the same e-Ink technology: black text on a gray background. The Sony offers 3 fonts sizes while the Kindle offers 6. I found the Kindle fonts a little bit more pleasant and the additional sizes worked out great for me. For image display, but of the devices are inadequate. Images are often unreadable on both devices. Both of the device also fail to perform a common function in books: hyphenation. You would think that since the font size can change, the device itself would handle the hyphenation of words at the edge of the page. Since the Kindle already contains a built-in dictionary it should be even easier for it to automatically handle this. The lack of the feature can produce odd looking margins especially when using the large font sizes.
The scroll wheel on the Kindle is the unique and defining feature. The Sony device handles all interaction through the e-Ink display which is, unfortunately, very unresponsive. The scroll wheel on the Kindle, however, is very responsive. This wheel will enable you to quickly select an item or a line of text (although it can be difficult to see if the light shines on it incorrectly). When you select a line of text, you are presented with 3 options: Lookup, Add Highlight, and Add Note. The Lookup option will lookup each word in the line in the built-in dictionary. The Add Highlight will enable you to select a section of the text and save it for later. The Add Note lets you add your own comments to the line.
When you need to download your notes, you can just hook your Kindle up to computer via a USB cable and just copy your plain text clippings file onto your computer. This particular feature alone has saved me countless hours of effort. I used to highlight my books while reading and then have to manually type any noted passage into my computer manually. This could take hours for some of my books. The Kindle makes it effortless. Now I only have to highlight and I’m done. This is the killer feature that has convinced me to buy all of my books on the Kindle if possible.
Of course the Kindle has free WiFi. This makes the transfer of titles of the device painless. The Sony device required you to manually hook up your device to a USB cable and manually sync. The Kindle just works here. You can easily manage where books are stored on the Kindle and you can easily redownload any previously purchased book to the Kindle. The Sony makes up jump through all kinds of hoops to do this.
Overall, I’d give the Kindle 4.5 stars of 5, and I would highly recommend that any book lover pick one up.
