Review - Kindle Ereader Part II

Ok so I wrote up a post about the Kindle Ereader before but I did not have one. I was very excited about the prospects of getting one so I finally decided to go out and get one. That post was speculation about how it would be going with the product specifications about the Kindle from Amazon’s website. Now that I have one and have had a little time to work with it (and by work with it I mean play with it) I thought it would be a good idea to give a real review about it.

I’ve had my kindle now for about 4 weeks and I have to say I am completely happy with my purchase. I was really excited about getting it and with in an hour of receiving it I had downloaded a few books. The box it came in was rather small, just big enough to hold the Kindle, the instruction manual (which I didn’t read, hey what can I say I’m a guy), the power cord and USB attachment. It was smart packaging with almost no wasted space yet very safe and secure packing. Right from the start the packaging impressed me let alone the device itself.

I followed the on screen instructions for a little while, walking through the step by step tutorial that begins when you first turn it on. That was until I learned enough about how to navigate around on it and then I lost my patience and started playing around with it. I was off to the races.

I had it sent to my work and spent about the first 20 mins walking around showing other people at work my new ‘toy’. Yeah I was showing off a bit. Isn’t it great to be the first kid to get the newest toy in school? But I digress. There were lots of people who wanted to see it and I showed everyone who wanted to. You get a little concerned about your new little baby and you hand it over to them gingerly and then cringe when they are not showing it the same kind of love and affection you were. Wait. It is just a device right? Yeah I know but it was MY device. After I finished ‘sharing’ with the other ‘kids’ I slipped away to play around with it.

Right off the bat I went shopping at Amazon for some e-books and was downloading some faster than you can say 3G wireless. My first download was ‘The Old Man and The Sea’ followed shortly afterwards by ‘Of Mice and Men’ and then ‘The Collected Works of H.P. Lovecraft volumes 1-4. More than I could possibly read right away but I was spinning with excitement and they downloaded so easily it was like dragging and dropping a file on your computer. They certainly made the ability to order books easy; in fact I might even say too easy. Of course that’s not a bad thing, unless you feel compelled to buy just about any book you see……….not that I was……..well ok maybe just a little.

I had only one problem with my connection since I’ve had it and to me it seamed perfectly acceptable. We were in the middle of a snow storm and I was in a section of the building that had 2 roofs over me (an interior and an exterior roof). I also have problems with my cell phone under similar conditions so I have no complaints about it. Since then I have also downloaded, the complete works of authors Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Edgar Alan Poe, William Shakespeare, The Complete Sherlock Holmes, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Bram Stokers Dracula, Frankenstein and a couple of others. Most of these were either free downloads or downloads that cost in the neighborhood of $ 0.99. Awesome prices for awesome pieces of work.

I’ve played around with font size, text orientation (reading portrait or landscape), bookmarking sections and adding notes. All of them work great and are very easy to use. I also tried the text to speech application and it worked much better than I expected. I was really expecting to hear an overly mechanical voice that was almost too difficult to understand. Instead the voice is very clear and while it is still mechanical, it is extremely easy to understand.

One of the complaints early on about the Kindle was that it did not have the capability to surf the internet. Now I’m not sure if it was still an issue when I got mine as I never tried surfing when I first got it. There were too many other things for me to do with it up to that point for me to even want to try that. However one of the nights I was showing it to a friend of mine at a Christmas party he told me it had started downloading an upgrade while he was looking at it. Later on that night while I was at home I noticed it had a section in the menu to ‘search’. When I tried it, it came up as a Google search. I typed in the only web address I could think of off hand (this blog) and sure enough it came up. I was able to navigate around on my blog and read everything. I nearly yelled out (to no one) that I could now surf the web. The Kindle had just become that much more useful to me.

Another thing that was an issue with the Kindle was that you could not increase the size of the memory limiting you to the amount of books you could own on it. Free space on mine seemed to be about 1.5 GB of space. Even with all that I have down loaded up to now I still have 1.43 GB of space available which makes me think that if you are using it for books and text you’ll be able to hold a LOT of books on this baby. But even if you didn’t have enough to hold everything you wanted you can move any books you have, via the wireless connection, to an archive for your stuff on Amazon. Anything that you archive can then be called up again as long as you have room for it in your current memory. Essentially this gives you almost a limitless amount of space for storage. No real need for a memory upgrade that I can see.

One thing I did have incorrect about it before I bought it was I thought the screen was backlit so that you could read it in the dark. This is not the case and if there is anything it is lacking for me, this would be it. You can buy reading lights, which I did, and it illuminates the device well enough to read comfortably in the dark. Other than that I could not ask for anything more from the Kindle. Perhaps in a future model they will add that as a feature but I understand now that the technology to do that while still making the text so easy to read with no glare does not exist. In the grand scheme of things, I paying $10 for a reading light am easily compensated by the ability to be able to read the device so effortlessly.

This weekend I had a chance to look at and handle one of the Sony Ereaders. While I did like the fact that they came in different colors and finishes, I did not like the fact that they were so small they almost seemed like they were made for a child’s hands. It also did not have a finished feel to it. I like the way the Kindle sits and feels in my hands much better.

While playing around on the web and looking for information about the Kindle I happened upon this blog. A Kindle World Blog. It’s a great blog run by a most knowledgeable lady. I’ve been stopping by regularly to find out new stuff and functionality for my Kindle. Great place to read up on them if you are looking into getting one.

I’m really enjoying my Kindle and would recommend buying one to anyone who is seriously thinking of getting an Ereader. It’s an investment but I think if you are a reader it’s a good one that you’ll be glad you made. I am.

For the record, it gets a big fat 10!

Now excuse me, I have to go download something.

Added the blog link to my Reading/Books