Dave

I’ve had the Kindle 2 for about six months now. When I purchased the Kindle, I  envisioned loading it up with the latest bestsellers so that I would always have  something to read while sitting around the airports or lounging around the swimming pools while on vacation. However, I have found it much more useful than that.. I love the fact that I can get the Seattle Times delivered to it daily. It’s great to sit down in the morning with a cup of coffee and read the paper without getting ink all over my fingers. It would be nice if my local paper, The Oregonian, was visionary enough to offer a subscription on Amazon but I guess that will have to wait. As an IT professional, I also like being able to subscribe to industry magazines. I won’t go into plugging names, I think I’ve done enough of that for a blog that is suppose to be about the Kindle.

Another big Ah-Ha that I hadn’t foreseen, is that I find myself sending a lot of my technical manuals, which are usually in PDF format, to my Kindle, simply to keep them all in one place, instead of scattered all throughout my laptop. After using my Kindle, as my technical manual library, for a few months now, I’ve found that the searching and bookmarking features have saved me a lot of time when trying to find that one paragraph, which contains the vital information I need. With my workload ever growing larger and my brain ever growing older (and in dire need of a memory upgrade), this aspect of the Kindle has been a very pleasant surprise.

I have downloaded a few bestsellers, to have when the opportunity arises, although I still have a stack of paperback versions that I need to get through, which brings up another advantage that should be mentioned. Many times I have an hour or more to kill and, believe it or not, I’ve left my stack of paperbacks at home! I’ve always got my Kindle with me, so now I’ve got something to read and hey, its not the most graphical browser in the world but it sure is quicker to open up my Kindle and google something than to crank up the laptop and connect to the Internet.

One thing that I would like to have seen is the ability to create folders under the Documents (Home) folder so that I could organize all those technical manuals and light reading material a bit better. Although the Kindle is good about coming up to where you left off last, its not a real quick task to locate a book or manual when your list is four or five pages long.

Another thing that I would change, if I had the opportunity, is that joystick. It’s not really an issue when reading a novel, because you’re typically not jumping to the next chapter, however, reading through the newspaper can really give you a kink in the thumb joint. Typically I don’t read an entire newspaper, and I doubt that many people do. I usually read a headline, and maybe a paragraph or two, and if its interesting then I read the whole article, but more times than not, I skip to the next headline. In the case of the Kindle 2, that functionality is provided by a little square joystick, at the very bottom of the unit, that looks like an IBM Thinkpad eraser head, without the eraser. This is not only awkward but I found that after reading through my first long Sunday newspaper, my wrist felt like I’d just spent four hours playing Asteroids. That probably dated me but my point is that this joystick should be farther up the side of the unit, like maybe right above the Home button. This would allow the user to balance the Kindle while keeping a thumb on the joystick. Oh, and maybe put an eraser head on it so its comfortable.

Ok, enough venting, I truly do love my Kindle and I’m very happy that I bought it, even though my wife could kill me for spending $350 bucks during the worst recession of our lives.

One last note; about the music, I guess a little background music while reading a novel around the swimming pool, isn’t bad but I truly hope that Amazon doesn’t try and add a bunch of mpeg player buttons and bells to the future Kindle versions. I love that it is as simple as reading a book, and if I need music too, I can use an iPhone. What the heck, you have to carry a phone anyway.