In which I review the new device!

For Christmas, I bought myself a Kindle. (It probably wasn’t particularly clever to spend nearly three hundred bucks on an unnecessary electronic device the very week I got laid off, but whatever. This may be why I never had kids. Moving on!)

The form factor is nice. It’s light, thin, and sleek. It’s comfortable to hold. The screen is, surprisingly, quite easy to read, even in fairly low light situations – though I’ll still be buying a clip-on light since I happen to like to read in no-light situations. A lot. (Side effect of having read ebooks on backlit devices for the past twelve years is that I expect to be able to read in the dark: cars at night, unlit rooms, pubs, etc.)

I think the ‘NEXT PAGE’ buttons are placed too low. I have monstrously long thumbs and I’m pretty sure the button placement would be annoying to men or other persons with large hands. The 5-way mouse thingy could have been a little more elegantly designed, but for a second-generation device it’s fairly well thought out. It’s attractive-looking. (I never in a million years would have purchased the original Kindle. OMG that thing was hideously ugly.)

I don’t know why it’s white, except that maybe they were going for a clean, upwardly mobile Apple thing. I wish it came in grey or black, because I think the white case makes the screen look dingy.

The keyboard is almost entirely useless, but at least it’s there. The ‘experimental’ browser is the same because it can’t display a lot of common web content, not just because I have a slow Whispernet connection.

It’s really, really easy to browse Amazon.com and buy ebooks, though. Wow. They totally got that part right! Instant delivery! I can already imagine the joy of this feature when finishing book 2 of a trilogy and being able to get book 3 immediately no matter where I am.

The ‘HOME’ layout is stupid and needs to incorporate tags or genres or folders or something, to save one from having to page through 1,500 titles at a mere 10 titles per page. I’m still digging around in various Kindle superuser forums to see if there’s a hack for that.

The battery life is astonishingly good. I’ve seen some complaints in various forums that leaving the wireless on will drain the battery faster, but my device hasn’t been charged since the day I got it and has used only 25% of its charge. I’ve left wireless on the whole time.

Another wonderful feature is native PDF support. This is freakin’ awesome! I currently have my résumé and a sock pattern – both PDFs – on my Kindle just because I can.

Two of my favorite ebook stores, Fictionwise and Baen, support Kindle. All of my non-DRM Mobi format ebooks can be read on the device.

My particular Kindle is a K2i, which means “Kindle 2 International,” which means it’s an AT&T device (rather than a Sprint device like the U.S. version). I mention this because, well. Here’s a map of the AT&T coverage where I happen to live:

Dark purple is 3G, lavender is lower-speed EDGE, and the red box in the middle is Walla Walla. I only get one bar most of the time; two if I’m standing in the yard.

Still, although book downloads don’t take place “in under a minute” for me, I signed up for free 14-day free trials of The New York Times and Blog Kindle, and it’s pretty cool when they’re both there when I wake up in the morning. It would be an especially trick freature for those with long bus or train commutes, because they wouldn’t have to do anything like sync the device to get their news each day.

Each Kindle comes with its own @kindle.com email address, so you or designated others – maybe people at the office – can email ebooks to your device. Neat! (Oh, but Amazon charges you a dime or more every time you do so. Boo! Hiss!)

I discovered Calibre, an iTunes-like ebook application (it’ll even download cover art) that syncs with a variety of ebook readers including the Kindle. I told it where all my ebooks were, and it organized them like iTunes organizes music. It will even convert ebooks from one format to another so that they can be read on different device types. Best of all, it aggregates feeds and either syncs them to the Kindle over USB, or emails them at a particular time every day, neatly solving the $12 per month fee one has to pay Amazon for daily delivery of each blog or newspaper. (Calibre looks like this.)

Apparently, Mobipocket Reader software can also be used to manage one’s Kindle and news feeds.

I had to hack my Kindle, of course, to take custom wallpapers, because… well, I just had to. (Here are the wallpapers I made.)

I’m pretty happy with my Kindle. We’ll see if I’m still in love with it in six months. It’s not half as portable as the iPod Touch, on which I have three different ebook reading apps installed (including Amazon’s Kindle for iPhone, which syncs furthest-read with the Kindle so I can switch back and forth easily).

I suspect that my Kindle will live at home, and I’ll use it primarily for long novels and news while continuing to carry the iPod Touch literally everywhere with me and reading short stories on it.

Total: 4 out of 5 stars

The Kindle is everything Amazon says it is, I just don’t know if I’m the right user for this particular device. I’m so used to having my ebook reader be a single application on a device that does a variety of other things that a dedicated ebook device seems a little stunted. I think if I’d magically received a Kindle DX I might have thought, “Now here’s a proper dedicated ebook reader!” because honestly the screen real estate on this device doesn’t pack the punch I’d need to see. The Kindle is a joy to interact with, and while my functional needs might be otherwise, intellectually I like the simplicity of a dedicated device that does only one thing, and does it well.

Update: A few weeks after I got my Kindle, AT&T rolled out better coverage in the Walla Walla valley. Yay!