Amazon Kindle Impressions

It’s time to get away from all this iPhone, iPod Touch, and MobileMe mania, and get back to shiny white gadgets.

Finally, I got my hands on the Amazon Kindle. The main reason I decided to take the plunge is because I travel between Tokyo and LA frequently, and having to bring books with me is quite a hassle.

I haven’t spent an awful lot of time with the Kindle, but here’s what I thought that was neat:

• It’s smaller than I thought.
  
  
• Having the ability to buy books straight from the Kindle.
  
  
• You can sample the beginning of books for free. 
  
  
• If you find a book that has a Kindle version on Amazon on the computer, you can send a sample to your Kindle. After you send a sample from your computer, next time when you turn on your Kindle, it’ll be automatically downloaded. 
  
  
• You know how you fold the top right or left corner in a real book to keep your place in the book. Kindle lets you bookmark pages in a similar fashion. Just place the cursor on the top right corner of the page, and click there. The corner of the page will be folded and turned over. 
  
  
• The screen utilizes a technology that Amazon calls electronic paper, which makes the screen look like real paper. It’s really easy on the eyes. 
  

And as for the not-so-neat impressions:

• When I first took the plastic protective sheet off from the Kindle’s screen, I saw some scratches in the lower left corner. Luckily, they weren’t scratches, and I wiped them off with some damp paper towels.
  
  
• The keyboard seems a bit stiff to type on.
  
  
• Although you can change the font size, I don’t think you can zoom in or out to see the images on a Kindle. This presented a problem when I was reading a sample of Beginning Mac OS X Tiger Dashboard Widget Development, the sample code was displayed in a form of a picture, and it’s quite small to read. I guess you couldn’t say it’s a problem of Kindle, but it means that I have to be careful when buying programming books.
  
  
• The refresh rate between pages to pages is not instantaneous probably due to the technological limitation of e-paper technology. In other words, when you press the next or previous button, the page requested is not instantaneously displayed. When you’re reading from one page to the next, the refresh rate seems to be fast enough to not interfere with the reading experience. However, if you want to flip back a few pages to reread something using the back button, you have to wait for each page you flip through to load first. You can of course navigate or jump to the place you want to reread, but in most cases, I think you wouldn’t know exactly. This is definitely one area where the Kindle cannot replicate the real book reading experience. 
  

So far I am happy with the Kindle. I downloaded a lot of samples, and purchased one book, Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good. There are several other books I plan to buy, and I am glad I don’t have to carry them separate when I travel back to Japan in 2 more weeks.

Stayed tuned for the unboxing video and pics.