Four out of five starsManufacturer: AmazonPrice: $399.99Web site: www.amazon.com
If Sony was one of the pioneers of e-book reader technologies, Amazon has fast become one of its perfecters.
By utilizing the same E Ink technology as the Sony Reader, the Amazon Kindle has taken a really great display concept and improved upon it by adding wireless capability. The result is a product that is ultra portable and can exist completely independent of a computer.
The wireless works by accessing not wi-fi, but Sprint’s cell phone data network. That means essentially wherever you get a cell phone signal, you’ll be able to download new books, magazines, newspapers and blog entries. The data network comes at no extra cost (although, let’s face it, you’re paying an extra $100 for the added wireless functionality).
And the network is fast – especially in Raleigh, where cell phone signals are fairly powerful. An entire issue of The New York Times downloads in a few seconds, as does a copy of Arthur C. Clarke’s Fountains of Paradise, just to use an example.
Turning the wireless on does suck the power down fairly quickly. The device is supposed to last about a week with no wireless, but after using wireless relatively infrequently, it only lasted a few days.
I was a little bothered by a few nit-picky things with the wireless. Books still seemed a bit expensive, and the fact that I had to pay the newsstand price for a newspaper, much less anything at all for blogs, seems a little ridiculous. There was also no clear way to check the progress of my downloads either, which deluded me into thinking I wasn’t doing something right.
As far as the ergonomics go, the device is a wonderful improvement over the unwieldy Sony Reader. Long buttons on each side of the Kindle allow you to hold it however you feel most comfortable, even if you’re left-handed (a consumer base which Sony apparently doesn’t recognize as legitimate). A clickable scroll wheel creates an added degree of functionality, since it can be used to navigate as well as highlight and look up words in text. A full QWERTY keyboard also gives users the ability to quickly search the Kindle Store or jot notes in the text of a selection.
The design not only works but makes sense, which can be a hard feat to pull off with such a varied degree of functionality.
But I don’t want to go so far as to say that the Kindle is perfection.
There are plenty of improvements to be made to the future versions of the device, which will no doubt evolve as quickly as the world of portable electronics around it.
There’s the (again) nit-picky stuff, like a grayscale resolution that’s only half as high as that of the Sony Reader. That makes it hard to view some of the more complex graphics and photos in newspapers and magazine, which – incidentally – are relatively few and far between.
But one of my biggest problems is that the device just doesn’t feel very hardy. It’s plastic exterior seems easily damaged and a side effect of the device-length buttons is a more fragile feel. I had a lot of trouble delicately attempting to remove the back cover to insert a SD card to supplement the device’s 180 MB of available memory. I’m not too keen on the fear of snapping a $400 gadget in half, especially when it doesn’t belong to me.
As it stands, the seems like Kindle a big purchase for the common college student. But if you’re a lover of literature (or magazines, or newspapers, or blogs), gadgets or you were probably going to buy one of these things anyway, the Amazon Kindle is worth the price.
