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

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