GottaBeMobile - GBM Shortcut: Amazon Kindle, Up Close and Personal - Part 3 : Tablet PC & Mobile PC News & Video Reviews, and Tablet PC Forums

Wednesday, November 21, 2007

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GBM Shortcut: Amazon Kindle, Up Close and Personal - Part 3

- Rob Bushway

In part 3 of our Amazon Kindle series, we get up close and personal with some book reading and web browsing. In addition, to doing some requisite book reading and notetaking, I show everyone what kind of web browsing will work, and what won't work. Hint: Javascript isn't supported, so there won't be any Google Reader browsing going on. Still, being able to browse the web for free over the included Whispernet / Sprint EVDO service is a great bonus. As I point out in the video, I'm not sure how long we'll be able to do it for free, but I'm going to enjoy it while I can. In addition, I show two documents that got automatically imported by sending them to my @kindle.com email address

Be sure to watch Part 1 and Part 2 if you have not seen those videos yet. All three videos give a more complete overview.

So the question to be answered after all three videos: would I buy one again? Yes. Having instant access to over 90,000 books is the kicker for me. Version 1 of the Kindle can definitely be improved, but free web-browsing over EVDO ( for now ) and instant access to all of those books wins me over. The Kindle is a great experience that could be improved upon with handwriting annotation. I would definitely take this places I wouldn't bring a Tablet PC or UMPC due to its non-intrusive nature. My wife wouldn't buy one because she is more of a purist. My kids, though, would eat it up, especially if they could get their text books on it. Amazon needs to lower the price to at least half to make it attractive to the non-geek market. I have a nagging feeling that more $200 of the price is going to Sprint to cover the EVDO access. So, I'll be keeping the Kindle and enjoying until version 2 comes out. Join me in welcoming me to the eBook world.

Books | GBM Shortcut | Hardware | Kindle | Ebooks

11/21/2007 6:48 AM MST

GBM Shortcut: Amazon Kindle, Up Close and Personal - Part 3 Comments [7] | Digg This | del.icio.us | Citations

Wednesday, November 21, 2007 9:44:37 AM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)

Welcome to the world of ebooks! I bought a Sony Reader last March and I've been using is regularly. I can definitely see where the Whispernet would be a very cool feature. I tend to travel a lot and will frequently have to take 3-4 books with me because I read too fast. With an ebook reader I can take along an entire library and be safe with having enough reading material. :-)

As a student as well, I would dearly love it if I could get my textbooks in an electronic format. That would be amazingly great. But to give you an idea of how locked down the few ebook textbooks are - this last term, there was an electronic version of a $130 textbook. The electronic version was only $60 (!) and you had to be online on the publisher's website to read it, you couldn't print out anything, and it was only a 6 month license to be able to "use" the book. How's that for restrictive! So basically you spent $60 to rent electronic access to a website. (For the record, I bought a used textbook for $80)

Sierra Modro

Wednesday, November 21, 2007 12:47:28 PM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)

I've watched a few videos about this device and I can't believe how painful the experience of using it seems to be. It not only looks like something from the 80s but the usability is as well. Did the designers and engineers not have opposable thumbs?

John in Norway

Wednesday, November 21, 2007 1:40:51 PM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)

Hi Rob - good reviews so far!

I live in New Zealand, so we have no Sprint here. So my question is this: can you purchase Amazon e-books for Kindle online usign a PC and then get them onto the Kindle using the USB cable? If so, I'm in. If not, I and all other people in the world outside of the USA are out.

Rod

Rod

Wednesday, November 21, 2007 4:08:40 PM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)

For the most part, the Kindle seems to be getting crushed at the Amazon site review section. About 50% of the posters gave it one or two stars. Most, however, do not seem to actually have one, they are just annoyed by the price, looks, DRM, etc. After reading some of the negatives, I tend to agree with them. No international wireless (USB download only); no real PDF support; no color screen (newspapers/magazines); kind of ugly (subjective).

I was going to order one for a family member for Christmas, but I believe I have been put off by the identification of the downsides. Not quite the iPhone for books that I was hoping for.

lark

Friday, November 23, 2007 2:19:54 PM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)

Rod:

You can buy the books, download them to your computer, and use the USB cable to transfer them. However, my understanding is that Amazon won't sell the device to international customers

Rob

Sunday, December 02, 2007 2:17:20 PM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)

You can get a lot of basic novel/prose reading done very well on your cell phone. http://www.booksinmyphone.com provides free book downloads that run on java enabled 'dumb' phones. I expected the tiny phone screen would be a big problem, but after a few pages I had forgotten all about it and found myself 'just reading the story'. It looks like they put some thought into the reader software, it's clean and sparse, you really only need to know to press 'down' for the next page. If you have the internet on your phone you can install direct to the phone.

avagee

Tuesday, December 11, 2007 10:35:37 AM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)

I saw this quoted from the user manual on a different forum:

On page 63 of the user manual:

"Your Kindle comes with an Experimental application called Basic Web which is a Web browser that is optimized to read text-centric Web sites. It supports JavaScript, SSL and cookies but does not support media plug-ins (Flash, Shockwave, etc.) or Java applets."

Can you verify this? Also, a different post of yours said that you could hyperlink from documents to the internet. Does it automatically load up this "experimental browser"?

Josh Loewen

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