Wednesday, February 25th, 2009...1:53 pm

Kindle 2 First Impressions

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I’ve spent about 28 hours with the Kindle 2 in hand. I have had a chance for my peers to take a look at the device, and while they’ve been enthusiastic about asking “is that the Kindle 2?”, no one really wants to sit down and play with it. When asked why they’re not so interested, their answers seem to be a resonated “it is just not that revolutionary of a device” and “i prefer the dead tree version of books.”

Contrary to their assumptions, I’ve have a great experience with the device so far. After a couple of hours, the screen “flashing” that occurs during page turns does not seem to bother me at all. In fact, I hardly notice it anymore, except when I’ve taken a break for a few hours and revisit the device. The number of interesting books in the Amazon Kindle Store feels unending, and I’ve been very satisfied (so far) with the choices. I have certainly downloaded somewhere near 30 free book samples, and they seem to give me a good idea of whether or not I will like the book. Doing this on the Kindle feels much different than having to browse the Amazon website and download and view a PDF sample; more refined and integrated.

A concern that I have is managing my content once it is on the device. There is no concept of folders, so all content is displayed on the Home screen. Sample content is blended in with full content, so it makes navigating your collection somewhat cumbersome. I’m hoping that enough users find this to be the case, and Amazon updates the firmware to support some kind of organization methodology (folders, tags, or at a minimum, content types like ‘Books’, ‘Sample Books’, etc).

The “screensaver” of book authors is quite pleasant, although I find that I have to explain to people that I show the device to that they are not necessarily covers of books or authors I am reading now. I look forward to being able to customize this further.

What are your first impressions?

2 Comments

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  • James

    My impressions are similar to yours (I’ve had my Kindle for a whopping 4 days now). The actual “reading” experience is quite pleasant and as you say, it feels perfectly natural after a short time. Things I’m not so wild about: The web browser is SLOW – not sure if it’s because it’s a Java app or what, but I know the Sprint network is faster than this. I didn’t buy the Kindle to browse the web, but it sure would be nice if that was a bit snappier, especially when reading blog entries that link to web content. I also agree that the organization of material could be a little better. I don’t have that much on the device yet – about 3 pages worth – but in a few months time it could be a real chore to sort through. Finally I wish the Kindle could read PDFs natively. The processes I’ve used so far to convert to .prc or .mobi have left me with pretty fouled up ebooks and diagrams just don’t come across at all.

    Still, I am very pleased with the device overall, and I’m happy I went ahead with the purchase.

  • http://www.kevinelliott.net/ kevin

    James,

    Thanks for your feedback. We definitely share a similar view of the Kindle 2. I tend to remind myself that the device is just meant for eBooks, and it’s designed to be a utility device. I even tell people this when they see it and ask me about my experience (sidenote: way more people ask me about the Kindle 2 than they ever did about the iPhone when it first came out). Sometimes I feel like I’m saying this to defend Amazon’s “shortcomings” (at least that’s how it’s viewed to many people). But in reality, I honestly do believe that this thing is meant to be a great replacement for a stack of books. After all, books don’t check your email for you either.

    Like you said though, it’s not unreasonable to ask that Amazon further explore the “experimental” features. I’m sure they are, after receiving lots of criticism from users with comments like “$359, and this thing can’t even let me develop a widget?!” — Kindle 3 likely has a ton of opportunities for an SDK, PDF content, color, etc. There’s enough competitors sprouting up (now that people finally believe that eBook devices are actually useful) that Amazon would be truly foolish not to be exploring these advancements. Given the rapid improvements of the AWS services, I’m sure they’ll do fine with the next iteration (but will they make it $99 — aka affordable for everyone else! — that’s the question).

    I find it absurd that they have not made organizing the content a huge priority. It should have been included from the beginning. Not having a way to organize your books on the device most likely discourages people from buying lots of content (subconsciously at least). Having access to all these free sample books is amazing, but then it clutters up your “pages.” At a minimum, we should see Sample and Paid folders (or something of that nature).

    I too am pleased over all, and very satisfied with the device. I would prefer to see some meaningful software updates, than have them focus on hardware improvements. After all, we’re already on 2.0.2 and have no new features (likely only new restrictions — Text-to-Speech limits).

    -Kevin