Other People’s Kindle Hands On
Ok, seriously, last Kindle post for awhile. But I started seeing a few people blogging about their actual Kindle experiences - sure only a few hours time but it’s worth investigating what people who have actually felt it (and aren’t journalists) think about it.
This guy got one and found the navigation metaphor to be very worthwhile. The strip on the side that contextually identifies lines, paragraphs and sections and provides feedback on actions you may take (i.e. turning the page). He thinks the e-commerce part is super easy to use. He also has a lot of bullet points and it’s worth checking out - overall he’s into it.
Another blogger posts his family’s impression of the Kindle. He liked it but his wife and step-father didn’t see the point. His two children (13 and 11) thought it’d be good for their text books. I think that’s a pretty interesting perspective to get… He’s also got some videos of the device linked to in the post.
Most recently I saw that Don MacAskill posted his review of the device which I was quite interested to read. Of the three he was the only one who had a Sony E-Reader to compare it with - and the Kindle compares favourably. His main issue with it is the limited book selection where he goes into a little detail about things he was looking for and what he found.
What I really got from this is that none of the three owners found the device ugly. From which I deduce a few possibilities. A) they have no taste B) it looks better in person than it does in pictures C) it looks better once you understand the device. I have my money on C. I don’t love the looks, I think it could be a lot slicker, but still - let me take this Frog Design piece as the prototype of people’s design issues, because, well, because it’s Frog Design. They don’t play.
First they get it wrong when they suggest that:
Amazon’s legacy has been built on delayed satisfaction–in other words, paying less to wait for delivery, rather than paying more and going to get it at a brick and mortar store right away.
Amazon’s legacy has been built on convenience - the delayedness is just a byproduct. Nobody wants to wait for stuff, but they’ll do it because they can order it from the comfort of their own home. They can find something online easily when they think of it. Going to a brick and mortar store, on the actual purchasing front would be a delay of the buying impulse. The Kindle falls right into that convenience sweet spot - improving on it by making it not only easy to buy but instantaneous a one-two combo that brick and mortar can’t come close to.
The whole design is unresolved and dated looking, with unsophisticated form, surface, color, and graphic detailing. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos says that the goal was to make it nonflashy as a design. Well, mission accomplished there, but it goes beyond nonflashy to be actually unattractive, at least to my eyes.
I think this is a real complaint. It just doesn’t have the sexy. Granted - even though Bezos wanted nonflashy - they could have made it a little more better.
The keyboard on the Kindle is a real puzzle–it looks ’80s old school and not at all up to scratch in a BlackBerry and Treo world. It is also very large and fixed in place, but if you’re reading fiction and light nonfiction, then there’s relatively little need to type.
Initially I had this problem as well. Why did they hook the keyboard up so prominently? Sure you use it every now and again but it isn’t so important to take up all that space. As I thought about it and looked at how people held this I had a realization. First, making it a slide out keyboard would only increase the complexity (and fragility) of the device as well as making it thicker and presumably less nice to hold. Second, the keyboard area provides the perfect place to hold the thing. Unlike a book which has no handle and requires you to kinda shift your hands around periodically, with this you can simply hold the bottom and never be covering any words. That’s pretty nice!
There is a huge “Next Page” button on the right, and a large “Previous Page” button on the left, following the left-back/right-forward convention…except there’s also a small Next Page button on the left too. Schizophrenic. Is Jeff Bezos left-handed?
Again, this is a book reading device. What is the one function you will need 99.999% of the time? The next page button. It needs to be available to you no matter which hand you are holding it. If you are holding it in your left hand, you need to be able to click the button so it makes absolutely perfect sense that it should be available there. Sure you need a previous button, but there just have the one big one and in the odd circumstance when you need to go back if you’re holding it righty, you can go the extra mail and click it on the left side. But having to do that every page turn going forward would be a device killer.
The capacity of Kindle is about 200 books, and that is more books than some people will ever own in their lifetime. So unless you put a high premium on portability, the hardware price is a big hurdle.
Or let me put this another way “The capacity of the iPod classic is 40,000 songs and that is more songs than some people will ever own in their lifetime.” Sure given the current available Kindle library I wouldn’t hit 200 books but even the iTunes music store didn’t open with 6 million songs. If the Kindle store starts getting in books (especially computer books, in my case), maybe even some comics (there’s tons of black and white comics that would go well on this, I think) and more magazines… I can see that capacity quickly getting gobbled up.
In general I think there’s a still a big question mark on whether this is going to be a success but the only real problems are the intertwined ones of DRM and available content. Still, the internet unabashedly hates it so who can say.
