I’ve heard so much praise for Amazon’s Kindle electronic reading device but little dissent.
I’ve only seen the Sony version of the reader, which uses much of the same hardware as the Amazon model. What stopped me from gushing over the device was its screen. The way the words look is more than a little bit crude, and I found that page turns took too long. I’d much rather have a regular book or even a PDF on a PC than what the Kindle and Sony models offer.
Today I see a ZDNet post from David Morgenstern, who also doesn’t think the Kindle has what it takes to beat either the iPhone as an e-reader or a real book:
One of my neighbors, a designer of hardware interfaces for professional video editing systems, bought a Kindle a couple of months ago. He put it up for sale on eBay less than a day later. He said the hardware design was “terrible.”
After borrowing and using his Kindle, I understood his rejection of the device. It presents a cluttered interface. And worse, it changed pages when I picked it up, with my fingers touching the long Previous and Next Page bars on the sides. This was his experience as well. (I notice from most publicity photos that the Kindle is held in the left hand from the lower left corner. Maybe that’s the secret but that’s awkward.)
In addition, I found the roller bar and its cursor track icon difficult to line up with items on the screen. And its browser was very slow.
