Kindled Part Zwei

I've now had the chance to play with my third generation Kindle for almost a week, including taking it with me on a long weekend to Germany. So: ( first thoughts )

Physical Format

Compared to your typical paperback the Kindle is slightly larger in height and width, noticeably thinner, and marginally heavier -- I don't have any scales in the house I'd trust to accurately weigh either book or Kindle, but hold one in each hand and your senses will tell you the Kindle is a touch heavier, though that might not be the case with some of the 1,000 page epics out there. 

The casing is a pleasantly neutral grey, the screen, which takes up the top three quarters of the device is black print on a white surface. The primary controls consist of large page-forward and -back buttons on both left and right of the screen, with the rest clustered below the screen. You can see a shot of the front of the Kindle here On the bottom edge of the Kindle is a mini-USB connector used both for charging it and for linking it with a PC, ranked alongside that are a headphone jack, volume control, a power switch used to activate the Kindle from sleep and a charging indicator. Two loudspeaker outlets are located on the back of the Kindle. A USB compatible UK plug is provided if a PC is not available for charging. 

The Kindle is fitted with 4GB of RAM, of which 3GB are available for media storage. This should be adequate for reading, particularly as books can be deleted and reloaded at will, but may become more of an issue if the music functionality is eventually expanded. Battery capacity will supposedly last up to a month of usage, with Wifi and 3G connectivity turned off, but extensive use of the wireless connectivity will eat into this. I started to notice battery power decreasing while using the web browser over the weekend, however this may have been exacerbated by poor signal quality and essentially I was putting the Kindle into a worst case situation. For general usage I suspect battery power will be more than adequate.

Screen Quality

I pulled the Kindle out of the packaging and assumed there was a paper note stuck on the screen, but no, that is the actual screen. Update of the 'electronic ink' is a bit slower and more visible a process than we are used to with LCDs, but the quality is excellent and I have found it very pleasant to read for hours at a time. It isn't backlit, so you'll need a light source if you're reading in poor light.

Connectivity

The Kindle 3 comes in two models, one with only Wifi connectivity, one with Wifi and 3G. I bought the 3G model as I regularly visit family who don't have net access. As soon as I powered up the Kindle it was displaying the 3G logo in the top right to tell me it had found a signal and was connected. If signal quality degrades then the signal will drop back to GPRS or Edge -- even in the bottom of a narrow valley in the Eifel mountains I was still getting Edge or better, and I didn't notice any dropouts while travelling 300 miles across Europe in a coach, though of course all this is dependant on being in an area with robust 3G coverage. Wifi connectivity seems similarly good, the process of identifying the signal you want and connecting to it is fairly trivial. Which connectivity method the Kindle uses varies seamlessly with task and current connectivity, sometime Wifi is preferred, sometimes 3G, the only thing to be aware of here is that Amazon charge for 3G delivery when converting a document for you (and 3G is the default for this usage), but not if it is delivered by Wifi instead, however normal Kindle usage is cost free -- beyond buying the books. 

Accessibility

I'm not an accessibility expert outside of my own area (mobility impairment and some coordination difficulties), so I can't comment in depth on accessibility for people with Visual Impairments. It's possible to to increase the font-size all of the way up to only a few characters per page. It is also possible to switch into landscape layout to give you a narrower strip on the page, further scaling up the image. For people with SVIs who can't manage with larger text the Kindle will also read what's on screen aloud, both for menu/control pages and for books, provided the publisher hasn't opted to turn that facility off -- presumably to make you pay through the nose for the audio-book format. It might be interesting to see that challenged under the Equality Act, specifically denying a reasonable adjustment when the facilities for it exist at zero cost is ethically questionable. The voice used for reading can be switched between male and female and the speed can be altered. I found the default speed a touch fast for my liking, at least for understanding the Kindle manual, which is where I tried it out, however the next slower setting worked fine. Unfortunately we're stuck with American accents.

Turning to physical accessibility; if you can hold a book you can probably hold a Kindle. Turning from page to page is easy enough using the large side-mounted buttons, in fact considerably less fiddly than turning a paper page, but the other controls are noticeably fiddlier. The bottom quarter of the device is given over to a small keyboard, and I mean really small, the keys are circular, around 5mm in diameter and 2mm apart. There is a shift key for caps, but numbers and most symbols are entered by pressing the Sym key and manoeuvring around the displayed table of symbols using the five-way  controller. The five-way controller is to my mind the worst piece of design on the Kindle and lets it down badly. It consists of a single 1cm square button surrounded by a raised 2mm wide rim. Pressing the centre button is the 'select' function and not bad, but the cursor is manoeuvred by pressing on one of the four sides of the rim. I found myself unable to use that reliably with a fingertip and just able to do it with a fingernail (I keep my nails a couple of mm longer than most men, if they were trimmed right back this might be more difficult). Even then I find I'm hitting the menu key 50% of the time I want the up key instead. For anyone with serious coordination issues this could be a major problem. Fortunately the five-way controller isn't extensively used in reading (it controls selecting a book and moving back and forth by chapters), but it is essential to using the web browser. Annoyingly five more conventional buttons in diamond format could probably have been accommodated in not much more space, or the up/down/left/right functionality could be made available via the four side buttons when not reading. There is definite room for improvement on this.

Reading
 

Obviously this is the primary function of the Kindle and it is important that Amazon get it right, which I think they have. At the default setting the Kindle displays perhaps half the amount of text you would find on a typical paperback page, which is about right for reading comfortably -- I didn't feel that I was having to change pages noticeably more often. There are no page numbers, but there is a percentage complete indicator at the bottom of the screen, which also indicates the 'location' of the book you are reading and the total number of 'locations'. Turning from page to page is done via the side-mounted buttons. You can also advance chapter by chapter using the five-way controller, and the Kindle will also remember the last place you have reached and open the book to there the next time you return to it.

Graphics in books are displayed clearly, unfortunately the ability to increase text size doesn't seem to include an ability to magnify images, which would be a clear advantage over traditional books.

The available books on the device are displayed in a simple list by default, but can be organised relatively easily into collections, so you can group them by author or by subject, they may also appear in multiple collections at once. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a way to nest one collection within another, which would be a clear advantage when dealing with one author writing books in multiple series. Equally there doesn't seem to be an easy way to order books via their order within a series.

There are also facilities to annotate the book being read and to clip segments of text, but I've yet to experiment with those.

Buying books at Amazon can be done on the net using a PC, or via the Kindle. In either case it is much the same process as buying a conventional book via Amazon's 1-Click-Buy functionality, with the exception that the book is delivered wirelessly as soon as the transaction is completed and your Kindle is connected. You can also subscribe to periodicals or blogs and have them automatically delivered. Turning to pricing, there seems a wide variation. There are a lot of free books out there (not all on the Amazon site, the Baen Free Library is one to look up if you are an SF fan and there's also Project Gutenberg and no doubt others I haven't found yet), but Amazon obviously want us to buy books from them (as do the other retailers selling in Kindle accessible formats) and there seems to be a range from strikingly cheaper, for instance the Stieg Larsson Millenium Trilogy at under £3 a book, to token reductions of a pound or less on the paperback price.

Books and other files can also be copied from a PC over the USB link, treating the Kindle as a removable drive. The Kindle can read documents in several formats other than its native one, including .TXT and PDF and Amazon offer a conversion service for several more, including .DOC, .HTML and .RTF and several graphics formats.

Browser

The browser is described as experimental and does have some clear limitations -- no ability to open up another tab, no Flash or several other common plug-ins, but within a few minutes of first powering the browser up I'd successfully opened up my account on a vendor site I use and bought something, so potentially very useful if you're caught without net access and want to keep yourself up to date or take advantage of any limited time offers.

It isn't fast in comparison to broadband, but even when the connectivity was down to using Edge I was able to load pages with lots of graphics in what I'd consider an acceptable time -- or at least acceptable given the absence of any other net access. Most net pages are too large to display readably in one chunk, so the browser had a window that you can move around the page, creating a magnified section that is more readable. Optimum readability may come with the Kindle switched to display in Landscape rather than Portrait, but at the cost of a letterbox format window on the page -- which suits you best may depend on the websites you regularly access.

A minor annoyance is that the typical URL needs you to access the symbol screen for the slash character and similarly for email addresses and ampersands, if you are using the browser a lot then you'll probably wish these were on the keyboard. A major irritation for me, potentially not for everyone, was the reliance on the five-way controller for moving from link to link -- see my comments under Accessibility. The process of moving to a particular link is somewhere between having a keyboard controlled cursor and jumping directly from link to link, usable for most, but annoying for those of us who can't use the five-way controller easily or reliably. Adding the ability to plug in a mouse via the mini-USB would be a useful way around this and give something closer to the normal web experience. 3G phones aren't necessarily a good model here, they pretty much have to be usable while walking, while the Kindle is probably large enough the vast majority of usage will be sitting, making an external mouse a feasible add-on.

Music

This is more of a not-review. The Kindle isn't a music player on the level of the iPod, like the Browser the music feature is described as experimental. It can play tracks, but only in the order they were added and the only controls you have are start/stop, volume and skip track. I had wanted to try this out this weekend, I have a lot of downloaded music available, but the Kindle only takes MP3s without DRM and my downloads are all in MPEG 4 format, so using them is going to mean converting them or waiting for an updated player.

Cover

Available separately, £30 was twice what I wanted to pay for a cover, but the cover for my iPod has saved it many times over and with my coordination issues a cover is essential protection. There are cheaper covers available from other vendors, but the Amazon cover seems to be the only one that allows you to use the Kindle without first removing it from the cover. Having to take it out of the cover to use is pretty pointless when having it inside the cover for protection at all times is the whole point of buying one. The Amazon cover is nicely put together and fits well, but I still think it is expensive for what it is.

Conclusions

I'm really glad to have bought the Kindle, it does everything I want and a touch more. The one real annoyance is the five-way controller, which may not affect everyone, but does make things more difficult for me.