Courier
September 23rd, 2009 § Leave a Comment
So apparently Microsoft is also making a tablet??? If this is true, I am extremely excited! I know it won’t be a direct competitor for the Kindle, but I do see all of these tablet/e-readers melding into one device in the end, with the ability to turn backlighting on and off for reading and more computer-like applications. Any news on the Apple tablet? I haven’t read anything about it recently…
To read more about the Microsoft tablet, go here.
Happy
January 8th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Slowly getting back into the habit of posting on the blog. I apologize it’s been a bit erratic since finals/the holidays. Right now I am finishing up my box of frango chocolate (good thing I have a godiva santa to move on to next!) and drinking lots of water. For some reason I am PARCHED. Just got home a little bit ago from class…was originally signed up for the 6-9pm section of marketing research, but since I’m going to drop financial econometrics, I can switch to a different section of marketing in the afternoon and be home in the evening. I like the sound of that better. 
But yeah, I ended up eating dinner in the Gleacher cafeteria, and a guy came up to me and was like, “Hey, is that a Kindle?” (I was reading on it). “Yeah-” (knowing he was about to ask if he could check it out). This has become increasingly common when I read in public places, and by now I have perfected my Kindle pitch. I know all the features that impress people, I have my anecdotes down pat about how my grandma uses the biggest font size, about how I can read in bed with a single finger poking out from under the covers. It really makes me SO HAPPY. I honestly have an irrational attachment to this piece of technology, that goes way deeper than that that I have for my iPod. If I were stranded on a desert island, assuming there was no wireless BUT an EVDO signal, I would bemoan the loss of my cell phone first, my Kindle second, my camera third, and my iPod fourth. My laptop would be way down the list since what good are computers without internet anyway? 
But yeah, I’m rather in love. And I want other people to be in love too. I seriously *can’t wait* for 2.0…but it better be as good as my dreams, and they’ve set the bar pretty high.
My Love Affair with the Kindle Continues
November 19th, 2008 § Leave a Comment
But I feel only lukewarm about the cover. I find it really comfortable to read with the cover on, but I wish it did a better job of holding the Kindle in place. The little plastic piece on mine has smashed in on one side, making the Kindle tip to the right when I try to read–rather annoying! I did a cursory search on a replacement cover, but none of the ones I found were that inspiring. Oh how I wish they would make one that matched the covers of these Penguin classics!
More Kindle 2.0
November 17th, 2008 § Leave a Comment
After several more weeks with the Kindle, I have a new set of wish list items for Kindle 2.0. In no particular order, they are as follows:
1. Ability to hold down a page as you scroll through previous pages like you would in a real book. There have been a couple instances where I’ve forgotten how some character is related to others, and I’d like to go back to where he/she was first mentioned without losing my place. I know I can set up a bookmark and then return to it later, but what I’m looking for is more of a temporary bookmark, so that it’s not there anymore once I return to my place.
2. The spot to charge your Kindle should not be located on the bottom, as this makes resting the Kindle on your lap while charging it highly inconvenient.
3. Since I only rarely use the internet on the Kindle, this really isn’t that big of a deal, but it’d be nice to be able to charge the Kindle via USB in more than a trickle capacity.
4. A better way to track where you are in a book. Currently you have to count how many dark dots you’ve covered out of 50 to figure out a sense of where you are in the book. Even just breaking up the 50 into more manageable fractions would be helpful to know if you’re, say, a quarter of the way through a book.
I’m also imagining a pop-up illustration of a book spine that would show you how much you’ve read vs. how much you still have to go…Amazon SDK anyone??? Or maybe just an alt command?
And really, page numbers would really be a lot more helpful than “locations.” Referencing the page number of the print edition, even if modifiers had to be used depending on what font size you were using, would be great. For example, “page 113-5 out of 1050″ would signify that I’m on the fifth chunk of page 113 of the print edition. That way people can actually cite stuff they read on the Kindle, without having to cross-reference a printed copy.
5. A better way to highlight. After thinking about it, a stylus would probably be inferior to having a trackpoint (IBM Thinkpad style) or rolling mouse (Blackberry style) because 1) people are liable to lose it, and 2) the Kindle currently does not allow a touchscreen (recent reviews on Sony’s eReader 700 also note that the touchscreen has led to blurry lettering…kind of the most important feature of an ereader!!). But in any case, it’s really necessary to be able to start/end highlighting at a specific word, instead of the beginning of a line.
6. In a similar vein, a trackpoint would also help facilitate more direct choices for referencing definitions in the dictionary (the lookup feature also takes way too long to load right now–11 seconds by my own experiment. I want to read not wait!). You should also be able to search the dictionary from the home screen. It would also be nice to keep a log of all the words you have looked up (someone in the forums suggested auto creating a Word table) to reference later. Gotta love vocab practice as an adult!
7. Smarter downloads. I definitely see the value in having, say, the Wall Street Journal download directly to my Kindle so I can read it anywhere and not have to deal with all the paper and inky fingers. However, I currently miss about 30% of my papers since I forget to turn on the wireless at some point in the day (and if you missed it, you missed it). It’d be awesome if I could program the Kindle to turn on the wireless for, say, 10 minutes each morning, to make sure all my newspapers and blogs get downloaded for the day. They would then be stored for a few days before I could read them at my leisure. (It’d also be nice to be able to delete particular issues of newspapers in the Content Manager, as opposed to deleting the whole publication.)
8. Revamp the keyboard completely. The current keyboard is ugly and difficult to use because the buttons are so small and require a lot of pressure to register. Assuming a touch screen is not an option, it could be made a whole lot prettier, and probably would benefit from being flush with the rest of the device so people could rest their hands there comfortably while reading (I currently rest my thumbs on the white space above or on the left flap of the case/the scroll wheel windor on the right…thus avoiding practically all accidental touches on the next/previous page buttons. I actually love that they are so large, and hope Amazon doesn’t change the size or placement of them!!! And honestly the process of turning a page on Sony’s eReader sounds so cumbersome…I want to flick my finger and continue reading, not have a laborious process in and of itself).
If I Were Designing Kindle 2.0…
September 29th, 2008 § 2 Comments
So, I’ve had my Kindle for a while now and I still love it.I find I read a lot more, and better books (classics are so cheap!! 99 cents for most, and some free content as well). I’ve only bought one bestseller so far (9.99 for those…currently reading Brisingr by Christopher Paolini, which is right now average to good). Anyway, as awesome as the Kindle is, I think it has amazing potential in the next few versions. I anticipate that a lot of the products we use now will ultimately consolidate into fewer, more powerful tools that are easily adaptable for our needs (i.e. I’ve been advocating the “e-machine” for a long time…a transportable device that will serve as an iPod, phone, eReader, laptop, etc. that can dock into a more permanent station at home with more memory and space and all that…I really cannot wait until this day–I’m sure it is to come ). So yes, the Kindle–unlimited possibilities, and I’ve been playing around with ideas of what could be improved, how the product could really be defined, etc. for a few weeks. Originally I was planning to ramp up my skills in Google SketchUp to make an illustration of my own, but after poking around on BlogKindle and other sites, I found a few illustrations that together formed my vision of Kindle 2.0. So, first, my inspiration!
In order for the Kindle to be successful in the academic market, it needs a bigger screen. Charts and diagrams in textbooks are vital to understanding the material, and making them into microscopic images destroys most of their value. Thus, you want a screen big enough to display textbooks, but small enough that it’s not overwhelming for the everyday reader on the bus. I really like the idea of a 360 degree folding device where you can open it up to show large pages in Portrait or Landscape, as well as two smaller portrait pages when the device is held horizontally. It should also be possible to fold the Kindle back onto itself, so you can read only one smaller portrait page, similar to the current format of the Kindle. After reading on it for a few books, I find that things are much simpler, and that one page is less overwhelming than all of the text of two pages side by side. I’d like the option of keeping this format. I also think the Kindle should be able to fold the other way, so that both sides of the screen face each other for safe storing. In general I find the next page and previous page buttons to be really useful. I am not bothered at all that they are easy to hit, and it makes one-handed, snuggled-up-in-bed reading both possible and enjoyable In terms of other smaller changes, it’d be nice if the keypad was part of a touch screen, similar to the iPhone, and it might be useful to include a stylus to more directly underline or choose words to look up in the dictionary. It’d also be nice to access the dictionary from the home screen, and search for words directly instead of first looking them up in a book, and then looking them up in the dictionary. I find that while I do look up definitions while reading, sometimes I later remember the word I “learned” but not the definition, so it’d be useful to double check more easily.
So all of these things would be awesome changes and could really make a superb eReader. But what would really be revolutionary would be to force the Kindle into a screen component of a DDM PC. I find the concept of DDM computers fascinating, and it would be a really cool way to tap into a completely new market. I kind of view it more like this, where the Kindle would be part of the laptop screen at home, and then could be taken wherever to read/listen to music/watch DVDs on the go (I know the scope of the Kindle is currently only books, but seriously, I wholeheartedly believe that we’ll eventually have one device to do it all). This would be great for families who have several Kindles, and could add/subtract to the main display of the family computer at home. But more realistically, I think increasingly family members each have their own laptop, so they would only add/take away from their own computer, which may actually work better for standard screen sizes and all).
So, what do you think? Is the Kindle the next iPhone? I say yes!
Edit: I also think it will be important to solve the following issue: now that people will buy fewer paper books, their libraries at home will be smaller, and it will be harder to show off what they’ve read to others. I also get a lot of comfort from being surrounded by all of the books I love, so that is lost as well. It’d be nice to allow some sort of “cover” that would display what you’re reading on the Kindle, though this isn’t a perfect solution. I can’t decide whether iPod-esque anonymity or public displays would be better…maybe the option to do either. Hmm…
