simplerich

The longer I have my kindle the more comfortable I get with it. One of the things that put me off when I first got it was that there was no manual. Well, there is… and it’s ON the kindle. Read away.

Another of the quibbles I had, and I believe I mentioned, was how hard it was to get anywhere in a book. Compared to thumbing through a paperback to find my place, the kindle was much harder, after reading through the instructions ON the kindle, I learned that I can use the thumbstick to navigate by chapter instead of doing it one page at a time. This made it a lot easier and faster to get to where I’m going.

I wanted to buy a magazine and see how those were done on the kindle. The cover price of the New Yorker is $4.99 but buying one issue on the kindle was $1.99 and had no dead trees involved. It was delivered within minutes and it was imminently readable. The cartoons are there and good as usual. This month’s edition had an article about the kindle curiously enough. The ease with which I subscribed, read the article, and enjoyed the comics sold me on it right away. Also, no lapcards falling out of the middle of it, and no ads for whatever it is they advertise in the New Yorker. Certainly worth it for me.

As soon as I find a way to do crossword puzzles on the kindle I’ll be thrilled! We’re not to that point yet.

In the experimental page of the kindle there is a basic web browser that I’ve used to get to the mobile versions of pages, news sites, wikipedia, webmd, and Chris’ site where I was able to make a comment from within the kindle. The keyboard is a little smallish, and I made a typo as my hands drifted off home row, but it was certainly more usable than my blackberry and bigger than that so I was happy with it. Navigation on the experimental web browser is a little hinky sometimes. It’s not super-fast at updating it’s video so it’s easy to shoot past where you’re aiming at with the thumbstick, but if I’m using that as a browser it’s a case of there’s no real browser available so it’s better than nothing and I think better than my blackberry for text intensive sites.

One of the concerns I had was how I would get some of the e-books I already own onto the kindle without having to buy them again. Sure, I’ve read them already on either the ipod or the palm t|x but I may want to re-read them on the kindle. Once again the instructions came to the rescue. If I plug my kindle into a USB port on either a mac or a PC it will open as a hard drive and I can drop .prc, .txt, and .mobi files into the Documents directory on my kindle and it will open them. This is free, unlike the e-mailing it to myself at my @kindle.com e-mail address which costs a small amount for conversion. I was worried the laptop and kindle would form some sort of ipod/computer relationship where I had to keep files synced between the two and if I plugged the kindle into one computer. I could never plug it into another, but that didn’t happen so I was/am very happy about that.

When the kindle turns itself “off” it throws up a random picture that must be built into the kindle. I haven’t looked for a way to get my own pictures on it yet at least. The pictures are of famous authors, and I keep finding them interesting. They don’t appear to have any relation to the books on the kindle because I have no John Steinbeck on mine and he’s staring at me now. Oh, and if I were Oscar Wilde I’d be really ticked, the picture they picked of him he looks like a complete fop, and maybe a bit light in the loafers if you know what I mean.

Overall, so far the kindle has been easy to use if not always intuitive, sometimes I still try and turn the page using the thumbstick and that jumps me to the next chapter. It’s convenient and amazon makes it easy to get information on to the device. The hoopla over George Orwell’s books that were fraudulently uploaded and then deleted by amazon notwithstanding I’m still very happy and comfortable with the purchase.

Earlier today I twittered that I was a fan of SmartyPig. I got two e-mails asking me a) Is it for real with those interest rates and 2) how do I use it? Well a partial answer for how I use it is to show some examples of what I use it for:

SmartyPig is an online bank I use it for saving towards specific goals both necessary and luxury. I think of SmartyPig as a reverse credit card. Instead of putting something on the card and then paying for it. I pay for it in small, manageable payments, and then, when I have enough, I move the money back into my bank-account and go buy the thing I was saving for. Rather than paying the credit card company interest on the thing, I get paid interest while I save for the item. This helps stop me from making impulse purchases, and gives me time to anticipate the purchase and shop around for best place to buy it.

When I first heard of SmartyPig and the really high interest rates (3.05% APY as of 5/27/09) they were offering compared to my other banks I was very skeptical. If it’s too good to be true it probably is was my assumption. I set up a trial account for my car stereo. 286 dollars. Yes. I can afford that as a one time purchase, this was a test of SmartyPig though. How easy was it to set up an account and would they really give me my money back at the end? Well, it was that easy, and yes they did.

SmartyPig is owned by Westbank and my deposits are FDIC insured. I started the account with twenty-five dollars and couldn’t do anything with it until the twenty-five dollars posted from my Wells Fargo account to SmartyPig. Once it was in though (about 3 days), I could adjust the amount of my monthly deposit as well as the total goal I was saving for and the time by which I wanted the goal met. I could raise the goal really high or down to $250 (the minimum goal you an set). I could even close it out and get my money back out and transferred back to my Wells Fargo account if I wanted. They didn’t hold my money or make me leave it in for any length of time. It was still my money, and still accessible by me. I set it at the goal at the cost of the car stereo, set the time for a couple months down the road and watched the money automatically transfer from one bank account into the other. I was notified at every step of the way by e-mail that a transaction was about to take place, and that one HAD taken place. It was very transparent and painless.

Once the goal had been reached it stopped withdrawing money and was willing to just sit there, continuing to acrue interest until I took it out. I opted to have it transfer out to my Wells Fargo account and in two – three days it was in my checking account waiting for me to go get my stereo, which I did.

So, I use it now for all my short term savings goals. My emergency fund is in INGDirect still. In the examples above I pay my insurance annually to not have to think about it or pay any weird fees for splitting up the payments and I’m saving towards a nice birthday present for myself. So, I tell it when I need the money and how much and it figures out how much it will be to get to that goal. Then I forget it. I make sure to set the goal a week before I need the money to allow for bank transfer times and then I just forget about it. It’s similar to bank offered billpay except I’m making interest on the savings.

My other goal is for a Kindle2. I really want one. I’m hoping that between now and when this goal is reached there’s a service pack to allow the Kindle2 to read PDF’s. I don’t want the DX as it’s big and I want small. Big would undo the advantage of the small form factor I’m looking for in the Kindle2.

Oh, a note on public and private savings accounts. These two savings accounts I’m talking about here are two that I’ve made public for examples. You don’t have to make your savings goals public, obviously I don’t make all my banking public, but these two were good examples of uses for SmartyPig.