Kindle 2 Review

Yay! My Kindle 2 arrived last night!

The two word review: LOVE IT!

Read on for more detail.

First of all, to see why I bought a Kindle 2, read here: http://www.keithpeters.org/?p=165.

And, here’s all the pictures to go along with the words. Most of the shots were chosen to give an idea of the size and form factor of the device, since that’s one of the points I had a hard time determining before I got it.

(By the way, I’m not a huge Emily Dickinson fan. When the Kindle powers off, it shows a random classic author picture. This was the one that happened to be on when I took the pictures. 🙂 )

So, UPS dropped off the Kindle at my house during the day. My wife picked me up at work around 6pm, bringing it with her. We did a bit of shopping and went out to eat. Riding in the car, shopping in the store, and sitting at the restaurant table were the places I unpacked and got acquainted with the device. I know my big question beforehand was, “how big is this thing?” Well first of all, it is THIN. Thinner than an iPhone 3G. Maybe about as thick as an iPod Touch. And about twice as wide and tall as either. While the original Kindle, IMHO, was freaking ugly, like something thrown together in shop class, the Kindle 2 really does look like an oversized iPhone. With no case, it really is nice and comfortable to hold.

I did get the official leather case for it. With that, it is nearly identical in all dimensions to one of those medium sized Moleskine notebooks. In fact, except for the texture of the cover, you could easily mistake it for one of those. The cover folds back completely, so you can still hold it in one hand quite comfortably. It’s not quite as light and airy as holding the device naked, but no problem either. The other good thing about the cover is that you can fold it in different ways to prop up the device. Fold it 90 degrees back and the Kindle is propped up vertically. Or turn it sideways and make it like a tent, put it next to your pillow and read while you’re lying down. I did both last night. 🙂 And you will want a case. I feel totally comfortable with this case, dropping it into my laptop bag and not worried about it being, scratched, banged, bent, or crushed.

On to the device itself. The main point of owning one is to read a book. That’s one thing to keep in mind when evaluating it. All the other features all lead to getting a page of text and maybe graphics on the screen and navigating through it, usually forward. As the promo says, the whole point is to get you lost in a book. So let’s start there. You hold the device in your right hand, and your thumb just naturally lands on the next page button. Beautiful. Click, click, click, you are reading. Couldn’t be better. Switch hands, same thing, there’s a duplicate next page button on that side. If you want to go back a page, however, the prev page button is ONLY on the left. Above the next page button on the right side is the home button which brings you back to your list of books. Not a big deal though. Also, the side buttons are hinged from the outside, so you actually have to press the inner part of the button to make them click. I guess with the original Kindle, there was a problem with accidental clicks while handling the device. I think that’s much less likely to happen with this new design.

As for the display, it’s very nice, easy on the eyes, easy to change font size, nice and crisp and graphics look great. Although I know we’ll be laughing at the ads that brag about the 16 LEVELS OF GRAY!!! in a few years time, it does look really nice. The background of the screen is not white at all. In fact, it’s a kind of pale gray. I feel like I could use a bit more contrast there, but it is totally readable. The screen is decently sized – quite a bit bigger than an entire iPhone itself, but it feels like it wants to be another 20-30% bigger. Feels like it’s kind of floating on the face of the device, rather than dominating it like an iPhone screen. Also… no back light makes me sad. I guess current e-ink technology makes back lights hard or impossible, or perhaps Amazon was just trying to save on battery life. I guess I’ll be looking for a book light if I’m going to read at night. But I guess you really need to compare the Kindle to a hard copy book, rather than a computer / iPhone.

Page refreshes are a bit slow compared to a computer, laptop, or even iPhone. The whole thing flashes black and takes a fraction of a second for all the e-ink particles to realign themselves to the new page. But again, compare it to a real book, and you’ll realize you’re turning pages faster than you would to flip a paper page.

So again, that’s 99% of what you need to know, because 99% of the time, you’ll have a book displayed on the screen, you’ll read a page and press the next page button and read the next page. Lather, rinse, repeat. And you’ll be able to do that with complete comfort and no distractions (at least not any caused by the device itself). The rest of the features are icing on the cake.

There are plenty of bells and whistles. While reading a book, press the menu button and an on screen menu pops up, allowing you to see the cover, TOC, beginning of book, any page, furthest page read, book description, search the book, add a bookmark or note or highlight, see your previously created bookmarks, notes and highlights, or start text to speech. Pretty much anything you’d want to do with a book.

Using the joystick-like 5-way controller, you can move through the words on a page. As you move across each word, the definition of that word is displayed on the bottom of the page. You can also hit a key to then go to the dictionary and see the expanded, full definition. Using the 5-way controller you can also highlight text which will be copied to a special clippings file that you can even access from your computer via USB. Or just start typing to perform a search or add a note to a page.

From the home page you can also go to the kindle store, where you can buy new books and have them delivered instantly, search the whole device, adjust settings, and use the web browser. The web browser is pretty basic, mostly text based, but you can set it to show images and enable JavaScript. So you could actually do some basic surfing and even do things like GMail, Google Calendar, and Google Reader. But in general, I think the Kindle would be my last resort Web surfing device. Beyond the grayscale and minimal browser feature support, read on to see why.

As far as navigating all these menus and using the controller to move through the words, select and define, etc., that part of the device feels really clunky. You feel like you are navigating through an old DOS program from the late 80’s, using the cursor keys instead of a mouse. If you are used to your iPhone, you’ll just be dying to touch that screen and tap the item you want. While the slow screen refreshes are forgivable in turning pages, it makes navigating menu items and individual words rather painful. If you move to fast, you might end up with 4-5 cursor icons on the screen at once, each pointing to something else. Give it a second and the old ones will vanish and you can see where you really are.

But I refer back to my original, key point: all of that stuff is just to get you to the point where you have a book on the screen and you are reading it. If you are buying this as an all purpose gadget, you are going to be disappointed. If you are buying it as a web tablet, you are going to be disappointed. If you plan on doing heavy bookmarking, highlighting, and note taking, you are probably be going to be a bit frustrated.

But, if you are buying a Kindle 2 to read books, you are going to LOVE it. So I can forgive the clunkiness of the menu, navigation and other stuff, because I’ll be using that minimally.