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154
Kindling Disappointment
Pros
Light weight.
Cons
Expensive, frequent freezes, slow response, no security, clunky interface, poor display.
Recommended it?
No
The Bottom Line:
Not actually usable. Strangely amateurish and dated interface, slow speed, large size, and poor screen quality combined with a hard sell and high prices rob Kindle of practical utility.
I got the Amazon Kindle 2 as a gift, and was eager to use the device. However, the more I used it, it quickly became apparent it was more of a mechanism to drive sales than the means for me to have any book I could want with me at all times in an easily readable format. The electronic paper display is the most difficult reading media I have encountered in the past decade. The device itself has turned out to have serious stability issues with frequent crashes, inconsistent performance, and a slow and frustrating interface.
Background
The Kindle 2 is an advanced version of Amazon's electronic book reader. Electronic books and other hypermedia first appeared in the late 1980s, and were even the subject of a science fiction novel named Cyberbooks in 1989 (about the early 21st century, amusingly enough).
The impetus to make an electronic book reader is to gain some benefits compared to reading a PDF or other document from a computer screen:
-Portability, ideally to the level of a paperback book.
-Content availability- theoretical ability to read anything, even if no physical copies are available.
-Capacity to have many books along at one time.
-Durability to last long enough to read a lot of books.
-Good display- as good as paper is, or else the economics make no sense.
The Amazon Kindle is intended to meet all of these requirements, and has built-in access to a very large library of Amazon as well as third party content through its wireless 3G access.
The concept behind the device is to allow you to download books and then use the Kindle to read them. Although you gain the rights to have a copy of the book, this can't be turned into a form where you could lend it to a friend, sold, or returned as could be done with a physical book. Instead, content is intended to only exist on your Kindle as part of your Amazon.com account. Presumably, if you move to another Kindle device sometime in the future, the books you have bought will appear there, automatically.
Description
The Kindle is unusually large for a hand portable device. If one were comparing with books, it is significantly larger than a paperback. The Kindle2 is closer to the size of a hardcover book's footprint. Since I have never used books that large as my portable reading, this is a major increase in size for mobile reading. The majority of this space is taken up by the large cream-white plastic bezel around the screen, which contains hard buttons for all features. The larger Kindle DX is considerably larger than the Kindle2.
The screen displays a picture of a famous author when the device is off, such as Jules Verne. The user has no mechanism for choosing what will be displayed, or to change this to a custom display. The power switch is a sliding tab at the top of the device. The top also has the interface for earphones, and the stainless steel back has two grills in it for speakers. There are no feet for it to rest on, so care must be taken when placing it on a surface which could become wet since water would wick into the case.
The keys and buttons on the Kindle have thin lined gray text, which makes them difficult to make out for anyone who needs reading glasses (my parents were kind enough to try that out for me). The keys do not have tactile features. The appearance suggests the design intent was more based on a minimalist aesthetic principle instead of usage considerations. While the text on the screen can be enlarged for persons with visual acuity problems, the labeling and fine buttons on the case are clearly usable only by persons with the best vision.
Usage and Experience
Interface:
The Kindle has no touch screen or touch-pad type controls. All input is by physical buttons. It has side buttons for advancing pages, and the bottom of the unit has a small keyboard. The right hand side also has a strange square cursor button which sticks up above the rest of the surface.
The Cursor Button is the only way to navigate on the page, and has 5 inputs possible: Up, Down, Left, Right, and Select (by pressing it straight down). The device is small, and the forces for all directions are approximately the same, so if using a fingertip, I have frequently selected when I didn't mean to. So, I have started moving it by pressing on the square sides with my fingernails. It is a little like holding on to the head of a 5 penny nail, but it is the only way to be sure I am making the click I wanted to.
Above and below the cursor selector is a rocker switch with "Menu" and "Back" functions. Given the large physical size of the Kindle 2, I am not sure why they didn't just put an inverted T of arrow keys with a select button.
The Menu button serves as an over-ride to whatever you are doing, and pops up a list of options on the right side of the screen. What is on these depends on where you are- there are different options within a book or on the home page. This doesn't actually make navigation easy, since you have to go to the right area to get the option in question. For example, to get to the Basic Web Browser, you have to go to the home page and then select "Experimental." But to navigate in a web page, you have to use the cursor key, which depending on what web page you are on, may or may not be able to select the item you want. If it has any frames, this appears get lost, and the slow update makes it hard to tell what you are doing.
I ended up doing this as a result of the Kindle Store interface on the Kindle. The Kindle Store only displays books, and while it conveniently shows them in categories, it does not break them down by price, or display the price. Rather, it displays them by what is selling best. For many books, it is possible to find several versions, all of which have the same actual content, but all of which have different prices. So, if you look up Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, there is a free version, and there are versions for $0.99, $2.00, $2.39, $3.99, $4.20, and $4.99. But they all look the same on a Kindle except for the cover art shown. You have to slowly click on each and wait for it to update to see which price it is at. This seems very contrary to the spirit of Amazon's web site, where half the reason to go there is they have someone selling everything at a good price you can find right there.
So, I looked up the word "Free" on the Kindle Store (more on why that is how I searched, later), and to my amusement there were several books on Free Books for Kindle at the top of the best seller list. However, I was hoping to get some basic content, so I moved over to the Basic Web Browser under "Experimental." I looked up Amazon.com, and came to a facsimile of the Kindle Store as the Mobile site. I wanted the full listing, so I moved around the little cursor until the "Full Amazon Site" tab was underlined and selected it. The browser crashed and froze the Kindle for about four minutes while trying to open the Amazon full site. So, not only was I not able to get price sorting, it seems a Kindle can't be used to order other things from Amazon, either.
Since I have small children, who have shown they are able to operate televisions, iPhones, iPods, VCRs, DVD players, and anything else they come across within minutes, I have been concerned about what happens if they get ahold of my Kindle. Since the user is automatically logged in at all times, and the device only requires you to click to buy things, the potential for hundreds of dollars in unexpected charges exists from just a few minutes of a child playing with the Kindle. Alternative devices like the iPhone are locked by a security code, and once unlocked, require a password every time a purchase as made, and this safeguards them from this sort of event. The Kindle's only safeguard for a purchase is a chance to retract your buy after you have already downloaded it. Clearly, it is meant to err on the side of billing.
As it turns out, there is a web site for Kindle users to get free content, though: www.freekindlebooks.org. By navigating to this page on the Kindle, you can get to the listing of free Gutenberg Project books converted to Kindle. Clicking on it downloads it to the Home Screen, where you can then open it as a book. Inside it, the titles are listed alphabetically. A little work on search can find Authors (read how below). The titles are all hyperlinks, so clicking on them automatically brings up the browser, which then downloads the book after advising you what it is about to do. The problem here is if there is a snag on download, you wind up with a phantom file where no title is visible on the Kindle home page, but if you try to download it again, the system says a file by that name already exists, and you have to manually remove it before you can replace it (a Catch 22 situation).
Display:
The electronic paper display is a medium gray panel in the center of the front of the device. I had expected the display to be larger on this unit, but it is actually a little smaller than the size of a paperback book.
The display has 16 shades of gray, but in practice this ends up being 16 darker shades of gray. Since the background is darker than newsprint, I have found the contrast to be quite poor.
The display has a very fine dot pitch, so text and pictures look very smooth on it. However, shades of gray make it much more difficult to read, for example, when highlighting text, it gains a darker gray background, which makes it harder to make out. Another quirk of the display is how it updates. The update speed is quite slow, even compared to low end LCD screens. The display also frequently flashes negative images while updating, so it is common to see it flash black momentarily. But the worst problem is the poor contrast of a non-backlit display.
I have found myself always looking for more light, yet even sunlight never gets the display to quite break free from the feeling the light not being quite bright enough to get the print to have as much contrast as it should. As I was looking at the device's brightly lit housing, the reason why suddenly hit me- the bezel around the paper is white- and therefore always looks much brighter than the display. As a result, anything you do to increase light on the Kindle reflects off of the bezel even more, which causes your eyes to adjust for that brightness, while you are trying to read something on a darker panel in the middle. The effect is the same as if a page of text on white paper was overprinted with a medium gray. As a result, you are never able to take advantage of the amount of light available. In contrast, the charcoal gray Sony e-reader, with a similar display, doesn't have this problem since the low reflectivity of the housing doesn't defeat the benefit of additional light.
My point of comparison for a portable reader is my iPhone, which I have found to be very easy to read from. Although there should be a theoretical benefit to being able to use the Kindle for longer, the rapid update capability and outstanding contrast of the iPhone display make it far easier to read from using programs such as Stanza.
Organization:
The Kindle puts your books on a single listing on the home page. There is no way to, for example, have folders to break them up into different kinds of books. So if you have the 2007 CIA World Fact Book, it will always be in the same list with Robinson Crusoe and Wuthering Heights. There is no mechanism to make your own sorting criteria, such as Science Fiction or Novels.
The only options for sorting books are by date downloaded, Title, and Author. However, these don't appear to work very well. For example, while sorting by Author, I have Jules Verne come before Zane Grey, but it isn't actually sorting by first names only because Joseph Conrad came before Daniel Defoe. The Sort by Author function just doesn't work. However, the sort by Title function seems to.
The Download Date feature behaves strangely since it also reacts to what was last open. To move through books, the cursor key will scroll down a page of listings. However, the unit will not allow you to keep scrolling to the next page. Instead, you have to hit the Next Page button to advance. When I contemplate what happens if one gets a real library on their Kindle, I can only conclude the device must be nearly unusable at that point.
Organization:
The Kindle puts your books on a single listing on the home page. There is no way to, for example, have folders to break them up into different kinds of books. So if you have the 2007 CIA World Fact Book, it will always be in the same list with Robinson Crusoe and Wuthering Heights. There is no mechanism to make your own sorting criteria, such as Science Fiction or Novels.
Search:
The modern world of large amounts of content has meant searches are a necessary tool for any meaningful application. The Kindle has organic search capabilities both for the bookstore and web functions as well as from within books. The search function starts any time you enter text on the device's small keyboard. The fine print on the keys and the small keyboard make typing slow. However, typing a return does not result in a successful search; it always fails to find anything. You have to take the cursor button and push to the right to select a search button. In a book, there is only one option, and I found the inability to find works I could see where in the book very frustrating. Only when the search button is highlighted will pressing enter cause it to make a successful search.
When in the web browser mode (it is listed under "Experimental"), the Search function can search in several modes, such as from Google or Amazon. This is apparently why it has the requirement to highlight a search button (though this should be automatic when there is only one option). The other key feature to know about the Kindle Search is it can't handle multi-word searches. One word searches are the only ones which produce results. It is very strange to discover a Search feature with so little capability in 2010, so I have found I have to actively remember its limitations.
Reading:
Reading on the Kindle is either very easy, or the device crashes and freezes for 5-10 minutes, during which it will respond to no inputs, including cycling the power button. There doesn't appear to be an obvious rhyme or reason to this behavior- suddenly the device will just freeze, and you are stuck until it resolves itself, at which time it will provide no acknowledgment of anything unusual going on. Note, this can happen when you are in the middle of a book and turn the page, at which time it crashes. When the Kindle is working, books open very quickly, and it appears to flow very easily. However, the crashes happen so frequently (~1 per hour of use), they need to be considered a critical flaw in this device.
You will need to go through the menu to be able to quickly navigate in a book. In a piece of Kindle strangeness, the device is not aware of pages. Instead, it calls a book a set of "Locations" A single page can have 12 or more locations on it, so the legend will say you are looking at "Locations 112-121" with a progress bar underneath which gives a numerical percentage of your progress through the book. I haven't found an easy way to predictably move around a book with this feature, and I am baffled by this since the e-book readers I have been using on my iPhone all show page numbers.
One item I have had great trouble getting used to is the dual sided advance buttons. The largest buttons on the physical Kindle are the Page forward buttons, but they don't have a molded bump or other tactile feature to let you know your hand is on them. The top of left hand button has the Previous page button, with the thin gap between the two as your only feedback for having moved from one to the other. On the right hand side, the button above the page advance button is the Home button. So, if you are reading thinking your thumb is in the right spot when it isn't, tapping can either pull you back to the previous page, or it will pop you out of your book to the home screen.
Battery life:
The battery life of the device in no way approaches what I had been led to expect from the specifications and what I had read. In my use, the device has gone through half its charge within a few hour of use. Anything I do which requires wireless access quickly drains the battery. So in typical use, it needs to be recharged every other day. The only way I can get to a battery life of a week or more is to not use the wireless functions at all, and at that point it means I am using my iPhone for all access tasks involving the outside world (which brings up a host of related questions like, "What do I need the Kindle for?").
Conclusion
I had high hopes for the Amazon Kindle. But in practice, the Kindle promises more than it is able to deliver. The interface is clunky and difficult to use. The device is prone to freezes which appear at random during use. The display offers poor contrast and a strained reading experience. It comes across as simply an avenue for someone else to offer things for sale rather than my own property and a device to do what I want. While it doesn't offer access to the full Amazon store, its lack of any security measures means small children are able to make purchases with no idea what they are doing.
I expected the Kindle 2, out two years after the device first appeared in November 2007, to be an advanced and easy to use means to have my books with me. Instead, I have found the Kindle to be frustrating and disappointing. And the turning point for me came when the question of taking it with me for an outing, I set it down and said, "If I want to read something electronically, I can read anything on my iPhone, which I'll have with me, anyway. Besides, I'd rather just read a real book which won't crash, is easy to see, and easier to carry."
Background
The Kindle 2 is an advanced version of Amazon's electronic book reader. Electronic books and other hypermedia first appeared in the late 1980s, and were even the subject of a science fiction novel named Cyberbooks in 1989 (about the early 21st century, amusingly enough).
The impetus to make an electronic book reader is to gain some benefits compared to reading a PDF or other document from a computer screen:
-Portability, ideally to the level of a paperback book.
-Content availability- theoretical ability to read anything, even if no physical copies are available.
-Capacity to have many books along at one time.
-Durability to last long enough to read a lot of books.
-Good display- as good as paper is, or else the economics make no sense.
The Amazon Kindle is intended to meet all of these requirements, and has built-in access to a very large library of Amazon as well as third party content through its wireless 3G access.
The concept behind the device is to allow you to download books and then use the Kindle to read them. Although you gain the rights to have a copy of the book, this can't be turned into a form where you could lend it to a friend, sold, or returned as could be done with a physical book. Instead, content is intended to only exist on your Kindle as part of your Amazon.com account. Presumably, if you move to another Kindle device sometime in the future, the books you have bought will appear there, automatically.
Description
The Kindle is unusually large for a hand portable device. If one were comparing with books, it is significantly larger than a paperback. The Kindle2 is closer to the size of a hardcover book's footprint. Since I have never used books that large as my portable reading, this is a major increase in size for mobile reading. The majority of this space is taken up by the large cream-white plastic bezel around the screen, which contains hard buttons for all features. The larger Kindle DX is considerably larger than the Kindle2.
The screen displays a picture of a famous author when the device is off, such as Jules Verne. The user has no mechanism for choosing what will be displayed, or to change this to a custom display. The power switch is a sliding tab at the top of the device. The top also has the interface for earphones, and the stainless steel back has two grills in it for speakers. There are no feet for it to rest on, so care must be taken when placing it on a surface which could become wet since water would wick into the case.
The keys and buttons on the Kindle have thin lined gray text, which makes them difficult to make out for anyone who needs reading glasses (my parents were kind enough to try that out for me). The keys do not have tactile features. The appearance suggests the design intent was more based on a minimalist aesthetic principle instead of usage considerations. While the text on the screen can be enlarged for persons with visual acuity problems, the labeling and fine buttons on the case are clearly usable only by persons with the best vision.
Usage and Experience
Interface:
The Kindle has no touch screen or touch-pad type controls. All input is by physical buttons. It has side buttons for advancing pages, and the bottom of the unit has a small keyboard. The right hand side also has a strange square cursor button which sticks up above the rest of the surface.
The Cursor Button is the only way to navigate on the page, and has 5 inputs possible: Up, Down, Left, Right, and Select (by pressing it straight down). The device is small, and the forces for all directions are approximately the same, so if using a fingertip, I have frequently selected when I didn't mean to. So, I have started moving it by pressing on the square sides with my fingernails. It is a little like holding on to the head of a 5 penny nail, but it is the only way to be sure I am making the click I wanted to.
Above and below the cursor selector is a rocker switch with "Menu" and "Back" functions. Given the large physical size of the Kindle 2, I am not sure why they didn't just put an inverted T of arrow keys with a select button.
The Menu button serves as an over-ride to whatever you are doing, and pops up a list of options on the right side of the screen. What is on these depends on where you are- there are different options within a book or on the home page. This doesn't actually make navigation easy, since you have to go to the right area to get the option in question. For example, to get to the Basic Web Browser, you have to go to the home page and then select "Experimental." But to navigate in a web page, you have to use the cursor key, which depending on what web page you are on, may or may not be able to select the item you want. If it has any frames, this appears get lost, and the slow update makes it hard to tell what you are doing.
I ended up doing this as a result of the Kindle Store interface on the Kindle. The Kindle Store only displays books, and while it conveniently shows them in categories, it does not break them down by price, or display the price. Rather, it displays them by what is selling best. For many books, it is possible to find several versions, all of which have the same actual content, but all of which have different prices. So, if you look up Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, there is a free version, and there are versions for $0.99, $2.00, $2.39, $3.99, $4.20, and $4.99. But they all look the same on a Kindle except for the cover art shown. You have to slowly click on each and wait for it to update to see which price it is at. This seems very contrary to the spirit of Amazon's web site, where half the reason to go there is they have someone selling everything at a good price you can find right there.
So, I looked up the word "Free" on the Kindle Store (more on why that is how I searched, later), and to my amusement there were several books on Free Books for Kindle at the top of the best seller list. However, I was hoping to get some basic content, so I moved over to the Basic Web Browser under "Experimental." I looked up Amazon.com, and came to a facsimile of the Kindle Store as the Mobile site. I wanted the full listing, so I moved around the little cursor until the "Full Amazon Site" tab was underlined and selected it. The browser crashed and froze the Kindle for about four minutes while trying to open the Amazon full site. So, not only was I not able to get price sorting, it seems a Kindle can't be used to order other things from Amazon, either.
Since I have small children, who have shown they are able to operate televisions, iPhones, iPods, VCRs, DVD players, and anything else they come across within minutes, I have been concerned about what happens if they get ahold of my Kindle. Since the user is automatically logged in at all times, and the device only requires you to click to buy things, the potential for hundreds of dollars in unexpected charges exists from just a few minutes of a child playing with the Kindle. Alternative devices like the iPhone are locked by a security code, and once unlocked, require a password every time a purchase as made, and this safeguards them from this sort of event. The Kindle's only safeguard for a purchase is a chance to retract your buy after you have already downloaded it. Clearly, it is meant to err on the side of billing.
As it turns out, there is a web site for Kindle users to get free content, though: www.freekindlebooks.org. By navigating to this page on the Kindle, you can get to the listing of free Gutenberg Project books converted to Kindle. Clicking on it downloads it to the Home Screen, where you can then open it as a book. Inside it, the titles are listed alphabetically. A little work on search can find Authors (read how below). The titles are all hyperlinks, so clicking on them automatically brings up the browser, which then downloads the book after advising you what it is about to do. The problem here is if there is a snag on download, you wind up with a phantom file where no title is visible on the Kindle home page, but if you try to download it again, the system says a file by that name already exists, and you have to manually remove it before you can replace it (a Catch 22 situation).
Display:
The electronic paper display is a medium gray panel in the center of the front of the device. I had expected the display to be larger on this unit, but it is actually a little smaller than the size of a paperback book.
The display has 16 shades of gray, but in practice this ends up being 16 darker shades of gray. Since the background is darker than newsprint, I have found the contrast to be quite poor.
The display has a very fine dot pitch, so text and pictures look very smooth on it. However, shades of gray make it much more difficult to read, for example, when highlighting text, it gains a darker gray background, which makes it harder to make out. Another quirk of the display is how it updates. The update speed is quite slow, even compared to low end LCD screens. The display also frequently flashes negative images while updating, so it is common to see it flash black momentarily. But the worst problem is the poor contrast of a non-backlit display.
I have found myself always looking for more light, yet even sunlight never gets the display to quite break free from the feeling the light not being quite bright enough to get the print to have as much contrast as it should. As I was looking at the device's brightly lit housing, the reason why suddenly hit me- the bezel around the paper is white- and therefore always looks much brighter than the display. As a result, anything you do to increase light on the Kindle reflects off of the bezel even more, which causes your eyes to adjust for that brightness, while you are trying to read something on a darker panel in the middle. The effect is the same as if a page of text on white paper was overprinted with a medium gray. As a result, you are never able to take advantage of the amount of light available. In contrast, the charcoal gray Sony e-reader, with a similar display, doesn't have this problem since the low reflectivity of the housing doesn't defeat the benefit of additional light.
My point of comparison for a portable reader is my iPhone, which I have found to be very easy to read from. Although there should be a theoretical benefit to being able to use the Kindle for longer, the rapid update capability and outstanding contrast of the iPhone display make it far easier to read from using programs such as Stanza.
Organization:
The Kindle puts your books on a single listing on the home page. There is no way to, for example, have folders to break them up into different kinds of books. So if you have the 2007 CIA World Fact Book, it will always be in the same list with Robinson Crusoe and Wuthering Heights. There is no mechanism to make your own sorting criteria, such as Science Fiction or Novels.
The only options for sorting books are by date downloaded, Title, and Author. However, these don't appear to work very well. For example, while sorting by Author, I have Jules Verne come before Zane Grey, but it isn't actually sorting by first names only because Joseph Conrad came before Daniel Defoe. The Sort by Author function just doesn't work. However, the sort by Title function seems to.
The Download Date feature behaves strangely since it also reacts to what was last open. To move through books, the cursor key will scroll down a page of listings. However, the unit will not allow you to keep scrolling to the next page. Instead, you have to hit the Next Page button to advance. When I contemplate what happens if one gets a real library on their Kindle, I can only conclude the device must be nearly unusable at that point.
Organization:
The Kindle puts your books on a single listing on the home page. There is no way to, for example, have folders to break them up into different kinds of books. So if you have the 2007 CIA World Fact Book, it will always be in the same list with Robinson Crusoe and Wuthering Heights. There is no mechanism to make your own sorting criteria, such as Science Fiction or Novels.
Search:
The modern world of large amounts of content has meant searches are a necessary tool for any meaningful application. The Kindle has organic search capabilities both for the bookstore and web functions as well as from within books. The search function starts any time you enter text on the device's small keyboard. The fine print on the keys and the small keyboard make typing slow. However, typing a return does not result in a successful search; it always fails to find anything. You have to take the cursor button and push to the right to select a search button. In a book, there is only one option, and I found the inability to find works I could see where in the book very frustrating. Only when the search button is highlighted will pressing enter cause it to make a successful search.
When in the web browser mode (it is listed under "Experimental"), the Search function can search in several modes, such as from Google or Amazon. This is apparently why it has the requirement to highlight a search button (though this should be automatic when there is only one option). The other key feature to know about the Kindle Search is it can't handle multi-word searches. One word searches are the only ones which produce results. It is very strange to discover a Search feature with so little capability in 2010, so I have found I have to actively remember its limitations.
Reading:
Reading on the Kindle is either very easy, or the device crashes and freezes for 5-10 minutes, during which it will respond to no inputs, including cycling the power button. There doesn't appear to be an obvious rhyme or reason to this behavior- suddenly the device will just freeze, and you are stuck until it resolves itself, at which time it will provide no acknowledgment of anything unusual going on. Note, this can happen when you are in the middle of a book and turn the page, at which time it crashes. When the Kindle is working, books open very quickly, and it appears to flow very easily. However, the crashes happen so frequently (~1 per hour of use), they need to be considered a critical flaw in this device.
You will need to go through the menu to be able to quickly navigate in a book. In a piece of Kindle strangeness, the device is not aware of pages. Instead, it calls a book a set of "Locations" A single page can have 12 or more locations on it, so the legend will say you are looking at "Locations 112-121" with a progress bar underneath which gives a numerical percentage of your progress through the book. I haven't found an easy way to predictably move around a book with this feature, and I am baffled by this since the e-book readers I have been using on my iPhone all show page numbers.
One item I have had great trouble getting used to is the dual sided advance buttons. The largest buttons on the physical Kindle are the Page forward buttons, but they don't have a molded bump or other tactile feature to let you know your hand is on them. The top of left hand button has the Previous page button, with the thin gap between the two as your only feedback for having moved from one to the other. On the right hand side, the button above the page advance button is the Home button. So, if you are reading thinking your thumb is in the right spot when it isn't, tapping can either pull you back to the previous page, or it will pop you out of your book to the home screen.
Battery life:
The battery life of the device in no way approaches what I had been led to expect from the specifications and what I had read. In my use, the device has gone through half its charge within a few hour of use. Anything I do which requires wireless access quickly drains the battery. So in typical use, it needs to be recharged every other day. The only way I can get to a battery life of a week or more is to not use the wireless functions at all, and at that point it means I am using my iPhone for all access tasks involving the outside world (which brings up a host of related questions like, "What do I need the Kindle for?").
Conclusion
I had high hopes for the Amazon Kindle. But in practice, the Kindle promises more than it is able to deliver. The interface is clunky and difficult to use. The device is prone to freezes which appear at random during use. The display offers poor contrast and a strained reading experience. It comes across as simply an avenue for someone else to offer things for sale rather than my own property and a device to do what I want. While it doesn't offer access to the full Amazon store, its lack of any security measures means small children are able to make purchases with no idea what they are doing.
I expected the Kindle 2, out two years after the device first appeared in November 2007, to be an advanced and easy to use means to have my books with me. Instead, I have found the Kindle to be frustrating and disappointing. And the turning point for me came when the question of taking it with me for an outing, I set it down and said, "If I want to read something electronically, I can read anything on my iPhone, which I'll have with me, anyway. Besides, I'd rather just read a real book which won't crash, is easy to see, and easier to carry."
