simplerich

The day arrived! My kindle2 showed up at work yesterday and I immediately plugged it into charge and waited for my work day to be over so I could play with it!

First impressions? The box that they shipped it in said “KINDLE” right on it. Not a fan of that. Once I opened the brown box the inside packaging looked as if it were made by Apple. I think Apple has redefined premium gadget packaging from clamshell to an art-form of pressed cardboard, molded plastic, and logo imprinted goodness. It may not be green, but it sure does make it luxurious to open the package. First impression so far is very favorable. The packaging is nice, makes me feel like I got my three hundred dollars worth of toy out of the purchase. I suspect that’s what the packaging is for, to help maximize the experience of discovering the new toy. It totally worked. Plugged it in and turned it on and it just worked. It already knew who I was — amazon had set it up for me before shipping it and sent me an e-mail letting me know they’d done that for me. While it charged it grabbed my book list from amazon. I’ve been buying books as they went on sale for a couple months now.

I tried to wait but it didn’t work. I snuck online at work and subscribed to a blog for the kindle and watched it show up. You’ll see a picture on the right of this post showing what the screen looks like. If you click the picture it’ll take you to my flickr page where you can see it even better. The blog was delivered over the whispernet which works wherever you have Sprint service so it works at my work, but not at my house. Not a big deal really, probably will help down the road with impulse buys truth be told.

There’s a noticeable flicker on page turning and at first it was very distracting. I’m used to it already and I read only a little last night. After playing with my Mom’s Kindle DX I was worried the flicker would make me crazy but it really did fade into the background quickly.  There are page turning buttons on the left and right of the device and I used both with equal ease. I wish there were a “Previous Page” button on the right as well, but there isn’t. Where it would be is the “Home” button. It isn’t a deal buster for me though. Just an “Oh, hunh” thing.

One thing I haven’t found how to do yet is go to a specific page that makes sense to me. The page numbering system is weird. Instead of saying page 3 of 256 it says Locations 782-89 which means nothing to me at all. I wish there were a way to go from the page I’m reading in a paper-bound book to some sort of corollary in the kindle. As it is I haven’t found it yet. I should, in the interest of full disclosure, add that I haven’t read the instructions at all.

I did e-mail myself a PDF version of an e-book. It was Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother. It was readable but the formatting was wonky and it wasn’t perfect. I’d probably choose a different format to e-mail to myself. I’ll look into that more later. But it did work and it was readable but I agree PDF conversion does belong in the “Experimental” tab of the kindle2 so far.

My questions so far are will it be able to be patched and/or updated or will it only be replaced? Will hacks ever show up to turn on the hidden features, OK. I know there probably aren’t any hidden features, but I can dream right?

Impressions so far I’d still give it a 96% rating. I’m downgrading it 4% because sometimes it’s slow to switch between books, like the processor needs another little bit of go-juice and because there’s no “Previous Page” button on the right side of the thing. It was only a 4% downgrade so neither was that big a deal for me but they’re my only real quibbles.

As an interesting aside to bloggers interested in a kindle feed or what it’s like. When I subscribed to Chris’s blog on the kindle I got an e-mail from amazon letting me know that it was 1.99 a month and that I had a 14 day free trial and my favorite part as a blogger… the bottom of the e-mail, in a line all by itself and very visible it said “Solo Technology Blog is also available online at: http://www.solo-technology.com/blog” This is cool because I could cancel right then and subscribe via my favorite news reader if I wanted to. Now I assume most people will find the blog first and kindle version second, but this is cool of amazon to do that. I wondered if they’d hide the source of the content or not and they didn’t. So Kudos to amazon for their treatment of bloggers, in spite of what George Orwell might say of them. *grin*

The Amazon Kindle: First Impressions by Rich Griffith, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.