My Review: Kindle 3G

I’ve been using my Kin­dle 3G now for close to 4 months, it’s a great lit­tle rev­o­lu­tion­ary device that a lot of peo­ple have inter­est in but are still a lit­tle ret­i­cent to pur­chase because of it’s seem­ingly steep price and per­cieved draw-backs.

Hope­fully, by shar­ing my thoughts on the device, I can help some of my read­ers to fig­ure out if it’s really worth their hard earned dosh or if they would pre­fer the butchered tree vari­ety of infor­ma­tional transfer.

I’ll keep the tech­ni­cal jar­gon to a min­i­mum and write from the per­spec­tive of the gen­eral layper­son, since that’s what I am.

Also, as a note, the Kin­dle comes in 3 dis­tinct flavours: Kin­dle Wi-Fi, a Kin­dle 3G + Wifi and a Kin­dle DX.

I will mainly be dis­cussing the 3G ver­sion since that is the prod­uct I own.

Per­func­tory Intro­duc­tory Background

Books are my drugs! I’m not kid­ding, I’ve spent close to $20k on phys­i­cal books and they are the pri­mary source of learn­ing and inspi­ra­tion for me. I love the smell, their feel, their tex­ture, I like the sound a page makes when it’s flipped, but most of all I like that they make me smarter.

I sup­pose you could say that pur­chas­ing an e-book reader was a log­i­cal step for me? Well, not quite, and I’ll explain some of the rea­sons for my delayed uptake of this device.

My Reser­va­tions

Back in 2007, the Kin­dle 1st gen was released on Nov 19 for about US$400…and was sold out in five and a half hours.

It really wasn’t even a blip on my radar back then since most of the books I was pur­chas­ing were art books as opposed to text books like I pur­chase now. Art books by their very nature, gen­er­ally require real estate only afforded by large page size, and more impor­tantly good colour repro­duc­tion — this clearly wasn’t the mar­ket the Kin­dle was tar­geted at, but it was the sole demo­graphic I was part of.

Because of my nar­row view on books, I couldn’t really under­stand why they were so pop­u­lar to be hon­est, it was an ugly device, I was read­ing doc­u­ments on my lap­top any­way, it just seemed like a filler device with over­lap­ping func­tion­al­ity to exist­ing devices. I’ve never been a big gad­gets kinda guy, so it didn’t really have the fea­tures to jus­tify the price tag to me at the time.

Also, hav­ing never used one, I assumed that not hav­ing the tac­tile feel of turn­ing would impact me greatly, and there is a cer­tain part of me that actu­ally LIKES a wall of books in my liv­ing room.

The third gen­er­a­tion Kin­dle came out mid last year on July 28 2010, it was a much sleeker look­ing device and boasted a range of improve­ments that really made me sit up, take notice and I finally caved in for one.

The ben­e­fits, for me, now def­i­nitely out­weigh the cons and I’ll go through the great­est impact fea­tures now in no par­tic­u­lar order.

The Good

1. Good look­ing: This made the designer in me scream with joy. Yes. Scream. Eas­ily the sleek­est gen­er­a­tion to date. Sure the look isn’t a huge thing, but it helps to actu­ally want to use it out in pub­lic and not hide it in a brown paper.
2. Amaz­ing bat­tery life: If you turn off wire­less con­nec­tions, this baby lasts for a month or more depend­ing on how much read­ing you do. The only com­pa­ra­ble device I own for read­ing are my iPhone which will last a few hours and my lap­top which strug­gles to get to an hour. So a month seems like a bloody eter­nity! The rea­son it is able to last such a long time, is because of the E-Ink dis­play tech­nol­ogy, which basi­cally only uses power when it is refresh­ing the E-Ink par­ti­cles. If you’re not actu­ally turn­ing the page, it’s not actu­ally using any power (assum­ing you have wire­less func­tion­al­ity turned off).
3. Direct sun­light read­ing: I don’t always want to read in a slightly dark­ened room with no light source behind me, but that’s what you kinda need to do with today’s highly reflec­tive LCD screens. Not so with the matte fin­ished E-Ink screen of the Kin­dle. Because E-Ink dis­plays actu­ally use elec­tron­i­cally charged ink par­ti­cles, as opposed to light to dis­play graph­ics and text, you can read the kin­dle any­where you can read a phys­i­cal book. If you pur­chase the Kin­dle leather cover with inbuilt light (and I highly sug­gest you do spend the extra $50), you can read it anywhere.
4. Inbuilt dic­tio­nary: At times, we all read books which like to use more than it’s fair share of jar­gon or words out­side the reg­u­lar con­ver­sa­tional sphere…such as dis­com­bob­u­late (I LOVE that word!). When this is done in a book, it can be pretty frus­trat­ing to have to check a dic­tio­nary every few min­utes in order to fully under­stand what the heck the author is bab­bling on about. The Kin­dle solves this with an inbuilt dic­tio­nary func­tion that is easy to access — sim­ply use the direc­tional pad to put the cur­sor next to the offend­ing word, and you’re pre­sented with a short snip­pet of the word’s mean­ing. Click another but­ton and the cur­sor dis­ap­pears for you to keep read­ing, it’s sim­ple, fast and unob­tru­sive. When you get used to this func­tion, it becomes an auto­matic reac­tion and is a HUGE advan­tage over paper­books. Def­i­nitely a game changer feature.
5. Free 3G glob­ally: You just read that right. Free Inter­net access any­where you can get a 3G sig­nal. Absolutely no ongo­ing fees and rel­a­tively fast. How does this help? Okay, so I was brows­ing a Lonely Planet guide­book on Cam­bo­dia with my girl­friend, we’re read­ing some infor­ma­tion on the coun­try and we’re not really sure about the cur­rency they use. One but­ton click later, I’m on the web on Wikipedia look­ing at the infor­ma­tion on Cam­bo­dia and the cur­rency is called the Riel. How much is a Riel in USd? Hop over to XE.com and it’s approx­i­mately 4000r = US$1. A but­ton click later, I’m back on the Lonely Planet guide con­tin­u­ing my read­ing. How. Fuck­ing. Awe­some. Is. That? And I did it bare-assed in bed with­out mov­ing. I don’t know how Ama­zon offer free global 3G coverage…but it rocks hard. Game chang­ing feature.
6. Free book sam­ples: I’ve been pur­chas­ing books online for a while now, and one of the things I do to reduce the like­li­hood of buy­ing a dud is that I like to read sam­ples, just to make sure I enjoy the author’s writ­ing style and per­son­al­ity. With the Kin­dle, every book you can find on the Ama­zon Kin­dle store, which is just about all the books avail­able for phys­i­cal pur­chase, you can down­load the first chap­ter free of charge. It cen­tralises the place I need to go to browse, sam­ple and pur­chase. Effi­ciency +100xp.
7. Sim­ple pur­chase and down­load: Ama­zon has always under­stood that the less has­sle and bar­ri­ers to get­ting their prod­ucts into your hands, the less has­sle it is for you, and the bet­ter their bot­tom line will look. The Kin­dle has taken a lot of the lessons they have learnt from their site and inte­grated it into the Kin­dle. 1-Click pur­chases are even more stream­lined on this prod­uct since it is directly links to your ama­zon account, no tedious enter­ing of credit card or per­sonal details, just click buy, and approx­i­mately a minute later, the prod­uct is there for you to read. Instant knowl­edge grat­i­fi­ca­tion. A nice fea­ture is that if you acci­den­tally pur­chase an e-book (easy to do on the Kin­dle), you can return it and get a refund rather pain­lessly, nice.
8. Cheaper books: The books you pur­chase on the Kin­dle are gen­er­ally 20%+ cheaper than the phys­i­cal equiv­a­lent on the Ama­zon store which is great, plus there is no ship­ping cost. In some books, they are even cheaper, I was look­ing at a tome of a book, it cost $100+ phys­i­cally, while the Kin­dle ver­sion cost $30 since there was no asso­ci­ated print­ing costs involved for the prod­uct. If you buy from Ama­zon a lot, they is a real cost saver.
9. Sim­ple PDF load­ing: Load­ing PDFs on you Kin­dle is easy, it con­nects via the USB and it effec­tively becomes a USB mem­ory stick. Drop your PDF in the PDF folder, and you’re ready to read it. Simple.
10. Good anno­ta­tion: The anno­ta­tion process is pain­less and straight for­ward to use. You place the cur­sor in the text where you want to add an anno­ta­tion, and begin typ­ing. Once you’re done, you press save and the Kin­dle will insert a ref­er­ence mark. When you want to read what the note says, you can either access it by plac­ing the cur­sor over the ref­er­ence mark, or you can view all your notes and their loca­tions in the “My Clip­pings Folder” or you can view a links page of notes and books marks through the menu button.
11. Instant Down­load: With the 3G ver­sion of the Kin­dle, you have the ama­zon store con­nected to your account details which allows one click pur­chas­ing and in most cases, if the e-book does not have a lot of images, it will be down­loaded next to instan­ta­neously wher­ever you can find 3G cov­er­age. Instant gratification!
12. Large capac­ity: 3500 books! Whoo! Obvi­ously it depends on the types of books, graphic heavy e-books will obvi­ously take up more space, but seri­ously, that is a lot of books.
13. Cross Plat­form Read­ing: The Kin­dle has cross plat­form read­ing, mean­ing that you can load your pur­chased books onto your iPhone, your lap­top, your iPad, your Android and a bunch of other places. The cool thing is, that if you have an Inter­net con­nec­tion, it will update the “last page read” book­mark­ing, and when you load up the same book on another device, it will take you straight to that page. Sim­ple, but awe­some feature.
14. Light­weight: It weights next to noth­ing, but still has a nice robust feel. It means I can travel with a crapload of read­ing mate­r­ial with­out need­ing to feel the impact of lots of dead trees.
15. Good image repro­duc­tion: The greyscale images look gor­geous, and this is com­ing from a trained eye. The tonal gra­da­tions are fan­tas­tic and highly detailed. I loaded a few Loomis art books onto the device, and even at the smaller read­ing size, you could still pick out every­thing and still read the words too.
16. Free books: You get free down­loads of a large selec­tion of clas­sics that are not part of pub­lic domain, like Franken­stein, Wealth of Nations, Sher­lock Holmes, etc. Cool fea­ture, but my per­sonal read­ing tastes don’t really coin­cide with this col­lec­tion. A nice to have, but I wouldn’t miss it.
17. Book lend­ing: You can pur­chase books and you can also lend them to a kin­dle lad­den buddy for a lim­ited amount of time. Cool fea­ture, but I don’t use it much since most of my friends don’t have kin­dles. Evolve dammit!
18. Wi-fi: Yeah, you get wi-fi but since I pre­fer to trans­fer files via usb cable, or down­load stuff via 3G, I don’t find I use the wi-fi func­tion­al­ity at all.
19. Social net­work inte­gra­tion: Easy to use and rather unex­pect­edly cool since I’ve been engag­ing the social web a heck of a lot these days. It allows me to annoy peo­ple with even more awe­some quotes. Click a but­ton to engage high­light mode, high­light the word, press the key com­bi­na­tion require to tweet (there is an onscreen con­text sen­si­tive dis­play that pops up to aid you) and click share…simple! Only caveat is that this only works for Ama­zon for­mat­ted e-books and not PDFs as well.
20. Good price point: As of this writ­ing, the Kin­dle retails from the Ama­zon store for $189 and in my opin­ion, a fan­tas­tic price for what you are get­ting. Just make sure you pick up a cool leather cover with built in light as well for an extra $50, well worth it to save your device from being man­gled, plus the inbuild light-source links up to the kin­dle bat­tery. No extra bat­ter­ies for the read­ing light makes me very happy.
21. Speedy Postage: Every­one I know, includ­ing me, who ordered their Kin­dle received it within a week of plac­ing the order. Nice!

The Not So Good

1. Buy­ing books is a lit­tle too easy: As I men­tioned before, I’ve acci­den­tally pur­chased a cou­ple of books before, sim­ply because it is so easy. The good news is that these acci­den­tal pur­chases are instantly reversible.
2. Some books are region blocked: I really don’t under­stand why, seri­ously, this would be one of my pet peeves, why on earth would you have a global com­pany release a global read­ing device, only to lock you out from cer­tain books because of your account reg­is­tra­tion loca­tion? Makes no sense whatsover. The upside is that there aren’t too many books that are region locked.
3. But­tons too small and clacky: One of my major pur­chase dri­vers was “I can update my blog on the go!” and if we’re talk­ing tech­ni­cally, I am actu­ally able to do so, all the tools are there for me to do this. How­ever, the biggest fac­tor stop­ping this from hap­pen­ing is that the keys are absolutely use­less for doing so, they are awful for typ­ing, so they are thank­fully only used to search for book titles and make short notes. The other annoy­ing thing is that num­bers are not rep­re­sented by tac­tile but­tons, instead, they are rel­e­gated to a sec­ondary func­tion which requires you to access another menu. It’s a minor gripe, but it is annoy­ing and unintuitive.
4. No color: This really wasn’t a major fac­tor for me to be hon­est, I knew full well that this device does not sup­port color, and because of the inher­ent e-ink tech­nol­ogy lim­i­ta­tions, it likely won’t for a long time, or at least sup­port it in any way that resem­bles the rich col­ors of glossy mag­a­zines. The nature of the books I read — mainly busi­ness books with lit­tle or no graph­ics, means I don’t really miss it in any way.
5. PDF read­ing isn’t that fan­tas­tic: A major­ity of the PDFs I come across are not cre­ated with the small screen of the 6″ Kin­dle in mind. The screen size isn’t a prob­lem with Ama­zon kin­dle e-books as they have text that scales, how­ever, PDFs don’t — they are of a fixed size, which means that if you have ter­ri­ble eye­sight for close up read­ing, you’re going to strug­gle as the pages are dis­played at a small size. The Kin­dle solu­tion is to mag­nify the page as-is, which would prob­a­bly be okay, except that the side-to-side and up-to-down page scrolling isn’t smooth and is instead dis­creet shifts which can be jar­ring. If your eye­sight can read tiny text though, it shouldn’t bother you too much.
6. The robo-voice reader sucks: The elec­tronic voice isn’t espe­cially lis­ten­able. I spent more time think­ing “the cadence and pro­noun­ci­a­tion is all wrong!” than lis­ten­ing to what it was actu­ally say­ing. I’m sure if I spent enough time with it, I would soon for­get it, but if I really wanted an audio-book, I’d buy an audio book read by a real human, not Robby the Robot.
7. UI takes some get­ting used to: See­ing as I am often heav­ily involved with user inter­face design and user expe­ri­ence in games, there are just a bunch of things that make me say “What the fuck were they think­ing?!” For instance, the afore­men­tioned num­bers rel­e­gated to a sec­ondary func­tion, page scrolling on the home­page nav­i­ga­tion can be a bit con­fus­ing, and func­tions that should prob­a­bly be log­i­cally grouped are some­times separated.
8. Lack of tac­tile feel: Since we’ve been Pavlov’s-dog-trained to flick our fin­gers across hand held device screens, we nat­u­rally want to get our grubby fin­gers all over the Kin­dle to flick the page over. Or flick a bunch of pages over back to the start of the chap­ter. Unfor­tu­nately, because of the inher­ent lim­i­ta­tions of the tech­nol­ogy, this will likely be an impos­si­bil­ity. For now.
9. Angry stares from athe­ists: If you pur­chased the black leather case with in-built read­ing light, peo­ple think you’re a church minister.

Con­clu­sion

Despite my gripes, this device has really proven itself to be insanely awe­some, a real game changer if you will. It makes my read­ing (if not my blog­ging) expe­ri­ence bet­ter than it is with phys­i­cal books for the most part and it becomes obvi­ous that this is the future of the printed word and a big stake through the heart of phys­i­cal book­stores down the line.

My ver­dict, is that this is a fan­tas­tic prod­uct and within a few days of pur­chas­ing one and show­ing it around to peo­ple at a pre­vi­ous work­place, a num­ber of folks sprang for it imme­di­ately who had been con­sid­er­ing it for a while, it really is that good. If you’re into read­ing, get it.

Keep kick­ing ass,

D-Diggity

Buy the Kindle:

Corporate Hindenberg No.7…or is it No.8?

In the last seven years of my cre­ative career, I have wit­nessed first hand the implod­ing of just about every sin­gle com­pany I have worked for, so that makes it about seven or eight com­pa­nies in the span of those seven years.

Is it because I have some kind of cor­po­rate death touch? Well, I have no idea, but it sure sounds like a good basis for a Bruck­heimer movie with lots of explo­sions and non­sen­si­cal dialogue.

The rea­sons behind busi­ness fail­ure are numerous…in fact, far more numer­ous than I have the space or men­tal reserve for in this blog post, so I’m just going to give that topic a wide berth.

Read more

Return to blogging.

Y’know, I love writ­ing and I love my blog. I really do, I find blog­ging to be cathar­tic and it allows me to indulge in one of the more intel­lec­tual plea­sures in my life…but dammit if life doesn’t have a way of force­fully inter­ject­ing itself between you and your best inten­tions of keep­ing it updated!

Thank­fully though, the inter­jec­tion of life in this instance, has been a pos­i­tive occur­rence full of learn­ing, love, grow­ing and a cement­ing of prior expe­ri­ences and ways of thinking…which means a great deal of writ­ing fodder.

Blog­ging is like any­thing that requires ded­i­ca­tion and habit, once you break the chain, it is easy to careen seri­ously off course into a ditch until you make a con­certed effort to pull your­self out and get back on track.

Well, I guess this lit­tle post is that con­certed effort, not much to look at, but I sup­pose it is a tan­gi­ble action to pierce the puss filled skin sack that has grown over my key­board pre­vent­ing me from bash­ing out lines of non­sen­si­cal jib­ber­ish and sen­tences mas­querad­ing as intel­lec­tual teeter-tottering.

A thought just entered my head — I think one of the big traps to blogging…or indeed going back to any­thing that you pre­vi­ously spent a lot of time engaged in, is to come back in a huge way, go back to the gym and hit the weights TWICE as hard, swim THRICE as far or come back to blog­ging and post TETRICE (…is that even right?!) as much!

In other words, make a grand re-entrance into the foray, which in itself can seem like a huge bar­rier to com­ing back to it.

Ah, I say screw it, just get the first one outta the way in what­ever hap­haz­ard way you can and take it from there.

I hope you out there in Inter­net land have been kick­ing ass and tak­ing names. And thanks to all the peo­ple who have asked when I’ll be back on the blog, I guess now I can say I am

Shar­ing is caring.

Peace, Dee­man.

Interview: Mick Gordon

When peo­ple meet me in the flesh for the first time one of the things they tend to notice is that I am a pretty pas­sion­ate fellow.

I find that the great­est well­spring of this pas­sion and inspi­ra­tion is from being around indi­vid­u­als who have a gen­uine pas­sion for what they do.

From all walks of life, hob­bies, voca­tions, the sin­gle under­ly­ing string that ties them all together is their unstop­pable tor­rent of zeal for what­ever it is that they do.

One of the finest exam­ples of uncorked enthu­si­asm (and unbe­liev­able humil­ity) is my audio­phile hom­bre Mick Gor­don who I met and worked with ear­lier this year on a game project.

He has been an audio direc­tor in the games indus­try for over half a decade and suc­cess­fully runs his own award win­ning stu­dio, Game Audio Aus­tralia ser­vic­ing most of the big boys, from EA, Sony Enter­tain­ment, THQ, Warner Broth­ers, Nick­elodeon, Mar­vel, Ubisoft and con­tin­ues to work at a fer­vent pace to add to this already impres­sive list.

Read more

A harsh rant. Don’t “should” me sonny Jim.

You know what irks me?

When some­one does some­thing worth­while, and oth­ers are moved to go up to them and say “I should do <insert what­ever that per­son knows they should be doing but aren’t…>”

What in the hell are they wait­ing for?! A sign from the Gods?

If you want to do it, then do it.

Take some damned respon­si­bil­ity, use some ini­tia­tive and go do some­thing con­crete to make it happen…or bury it because no one wants to hear about what you “should” be doing any more than they want to hear about your anal warts.

Harsh I know, but some­times so is the truth.

Daz­man.

Dreams and Suicide

It is almost 11pm on a Thursday.

It is another cold Mel­bourne night and I sit here again in my warm lit­tle home stu­dio at my key­board com­pelled to write while the tree out­side my win­dow plays tag with the wind.

I wanted to write now while my emo­tions are still fresh.

I have spent the last two hours relax­ing from my hec­tic work sched­ule, watch­ing a rel­a­tively old film — Dead Poet’s Soci­ety, which I have been told many times is fan­tas­tic, but never got around to view­ing until tonight.

Unabashedly speak­ing, I cried while watch­ing it.

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Why you need to become more than just a creative.

I tend to think a lack of busi­ness skills on the part of cre­atives, deval­ues the entire indus­try more than any other factor.

Because cre­atives have no idea how to charge, no idea how to estab­lish their worth in the minds of clients and thus no com­mer­cial back bone, we col­lec­tively suf­fer as an industry.

Here is a lament I often hear from other cre­ative types:

“Clients are so dumb! They com­pletely under­value my work!”

Wrong chump.

Read more

Some new sketches =)

I did a cou­ple of sketches today, one was for a stu­dent, the other just to record the process and prac­tice some tonal work.

Enjoy!

Here is the YouTube video of the last one:

Self

I’ve noticed that a lot of folks who seem to do the most remark­able things (like Rein­hold Mess­ner for exam­ple, the first per­son to climb all 14 of the world’s peaks taller than 8000m) were actu­ally just try­ing to under­stand their own lim­its and themselves.

Inspir­ing as hell, Christ, I get tinglies just look­ing at this:

Some new arts…

Hey dudes and dudettes, been try­ing to really ham­mer down on that large piece, I finally feel that is is close! So damn close! It has really sur­prised me how long it takes to do an A0 ren­der­ing in pen­cil and char­coal, holy hell it is time con­sum­ing, but is com­ing out nicely!

Yes­ter­day night, I wanted to take a break and did this as a 1/2 hour break and recorded a sketch and fin­ished with this:

If you’d like to check out the video process from start to fin­ish, see it here at youtube:

Today, I went to sketch­group and did a sketch of a demon’s head, it was fun:

Any­way, I look for­ward to get­ting some decent time to do some per­sonal work after this week hope­fully, I need long stretches of time to do any decent art dammit! I don’t want to keep just doing sketches! I want to do some­thing nice and polished!

Hope you’re all keep­ing well in Inter­nets land.

D-man