Kindle 2 Thoughts
Photo: Amazon.com/Kindle2
From what I have been reading there are some fairly common complaints about the latest version of the Amazon Kindle. The most popular of these seem to be, lack of touch screen, no color screen, no ‘open-ness’ and price. All of these I think would be nice features to have, but would come at a cost. I currently own a first generation Kindle and don’t see myself upgrading to the newer version as there are not that many new features that are important to me. Tough if you are debating getting into the eReader game I don’t think you can go wrong with the Kindle 2
The touch screen addition is I think the most useful. The major problem with adding one to the Kindle would be price. The iRex Illiad has had an eReader with a touch screen for a little over a year now. There are a few reason the iRex isn’t widely know, the main one is there are so few out there starting at $750 not a whole lot of people are running out to pick one up. The other is while it does support PDF and other popular document formats they have not built a content system around it like Amazon has done for the Kindle. I think if Amazon were to buy iRex and offer a ‘Kindle Pro’ that was the touch screen Illiad and have access to the Kindle library you may see wider adoption. This leads me to what I really think Amazon should work towards, which is they should license the ability to read books. Although I would prefer this to just be an open standard I think the licencing plan is more realistic.
The other problem with the touch screen idea on the Kindle would be it would hurt the battery life considerably when the touch screen was active. iRex did a cleaver thing to get around this by putting a switch in the stylus holder that turns off the touch screen when the stylus is in the device.
The color screen will come as technology pushes on. As of now there are no full scale production of color eInk displays. Using a LCD on the device would defeat the purpose of an eReader. I’m sure even with a color eInk display it will come at a cost of some battery life but I wouldn’t think it would be anything that would be unmanageable. I don’t see this as a requirement though, I am perfectly happy reading a book in black and white like most of the print books I own.
The ‘open-ness’ of the device I would lump in there with the lack of native support of alot of common formats such as PDF and DOC. These formats can be read on the Kindle via a conversion process. The Kindle also natively support the common MOBI ebook format. The need for a conversion makes sense in formats such as PDF which are page based and to a lesser extent DOCs but it would be nice if Amazon provided a PC/MAC/Linux application to handle this conversion. I suspect they do this to make some money with the ‘convert and send’ option which is very convenient. As I said above I would like Amazon to open up the format more but I will not hold my breath, they are following in Apple’s footsteps here and it seems to be working. I do think they will end up in the same place as Apple though a few years down the road as far as DRM is concerned.
The last concern is the price. I have mentioned this to some extent. While I wouldn’t say I have payed for my Kindle with the money I’m saving on books the savings are significant. I am also reading more partly because of the ‘I paid $300-something for this think I probably should use it’ but also because it makes reading more convenient for me.