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David A's kindle experience |
Updated March 2, 2011.
put Kindle 2 down one day after reading for a few minutes
and had the oddest feeling of seeing exactly that motion
with a similar form-factor device on StarTrek Next Generation!
he Kindle 2 and DX (by Amazon) are quite nice devices but
with a few remaining flaws (as of March 2011).
Physically they look good and are very pleasant to use.
The Kindle DX keyboard (if you can call it a keyboard) is
initially confusing but I really like it better than the
2 keyboard: I find it faster to use.
Nice work, Amazon.
I used to go to Borders and look at the new books and buy all the new science fiction. Now I find myself using sources like recommendations from magazines and friends instead. And when I find an author or series I like I buy all the books available on Kindle by that author or in that series. I guess it's no wonder Borders is having financial trouble!
As of 2011 I read The Economist, Asimov's, and The Atlantic on Kindle. Being mainly words these are fine and easy to handle. On the other hand I won't attempt to read magazines with lots of graphs or charts on Kindle, that won't work on the monochrome screen at all. The tables and graphs on The Economist are largely impossible to read (specially the ones at the end pages of the magazine) but those are not really important to me in reading the Economist.
Though diagrams (maps, for example) in books show up they are still a bit hard to read. Certainaly better than in 2009, but the limited contrast and the dot density (on the older Kindles such as I have, newer ones are better I understand) limits what the screen can do.
Recently the special toggle button on the Kindle 2 broke in half (we have no idea how). Amazon shipped a new device (and we shipped the old one back in their box). Nice service.
There are always limits on what you can buy, the publishers seem slow to react to the new world of book publishing. I don't fault Amazon for this, but it is an annoyance.
The 'Kindle Top Sellers' is fun to browse. Astonishingly, one (fantasy) book that seemed interesting had a $0 Kindle price! I ordered it :-) There are a number of classics available free too. And looking at the kindle catalog (on Kindle) I have had little trouble finding interesting things for $9.99 or less.
Type in a search term and press 'go'. What? Not found? Ah. You have just discovered that searches only work on whole words! Partial words searches are not implemented! There is no way to change the search preferences (AFAICT). So no way to say 'pay attention to capitalization' or 'match any substring' or, well, anything. No way to add wildcards into the match. Nothing. This makes the search really irritating when dealing with technical documents.
While I appreciate the PDF support on Kindle these days it is not really very usable. The problem is that the type size is not alterable and the screen contrast makes the 'print' hard to read.
http://reality.sgiweb.org/davea/kindle.html