From Evernote:

A kind review of the Kindle 3 - the iPad's not for books

I admit to surprise in finding myself reviewing (favourably) Amazon's Kindle. I had my doubts about system-specific e-readers in general and Amazon's offering in particular.  I felt that no e-reader seems to offer anything like the book reading experience I had loved since childhood. And they were far too expensive for what they actually were in essence. I had felt that wifi and 3G capability was a red herring.

The Kindle has changed my point of view in almost every particular.  It is not a book and does not deliver that book 'feel'.  To expect that is wrong-headed. What the Kindle does, and does very well, is deliver all the types of reading material to your hand whenever you want it and pretty much wherever you are.

We are a family of two writers and a teenager with fervent reading habits.  We were running out of space to keep books, and travelling together meant carrying a lot of manuscripts and books around. I was getting tired of my anxiousness over book storage.  The prospect of moving house fills me with dread. A book was no longer a thrilling innocent, a new soul, to taken under one's wing and lovingly guarded but one quickly soiled by over population and economics. Books in their printed bodies became sinners in our peripatetic life.

Three things about the latest Kindle version drew my eyes down from bookcases to the Amazon pages: its experimental web browser that allowed for some primitive web interactions, its ability to convert PDF files and its free 3G capabilities. Suddenly a life of letters found a parallel universe in the pocket of a coat or an outside pocket of a bag.

The Kindle 3 is the right size.  I don't know how long it took Amazon to settle on these dimensions but they are exactly right.  Other readers are too thick, too heavy, too long.  The iPad has exactly the wrong footprint for me: you cannot hold it in one hand or put it in a large coat pocket, and slim though it may be, it's still too heavy to feel as free as one would like to feel.

I like emailing documents to it.  If I am out and about and someone wants to show me something, they can email the document to the Kindle.  No need to lug a computer about. Since I read a lot of classics which one can find for free all over the Internet, the free conversion service is a dream. The web capability is primitive but perfectly functional.  The Kindle web browser will not do pop-up windows or have more than one window open so doing your social media or shopping with it will not really work.  One has to physically tab the cursor around the web page to highlight links and entry fields, and I can see this will be disconcerting to those who are used to touch screens, but the point is, as a fall back service it does work. A quick news check or weather report or even a google map are all there to be had. While the Kindle's own internal dictionaries are very useful too and easy to use; just highlight a word and you can see the quick dictionary definition immediately or click a button and go the in depth article, you can also search Google or Wikipedia.  Great stuff.

The print is easy to read although it should be made clear that the display is not black on white but rather black on grey, and is impossible to read in low light conditions, but to read this in full sunlight is a joy.  This to me is the principal boon. When laptop screens and mobile phones vanish into the light, the Kindle display is even better.   There is simply no reason to use an iPad to read when you can only use it indoors. I think recent statistics are bearing this out.  Fewer and fewer iPad uses use their device to read.

The second boon is the battery life.  I have been weary beyond words for years at the continual need to charge up appliances.  To throw the Kindle in my bag and take off without even wondering if it has a charge in it, is a simple but profound delight. In this respect too, the Kindle warns you to re-charge long before it actually closes down.  Like a good reservoir tank gauge it tells you in good time - flick off the wifi and 3G at first warning and it'll last you another day.  Without wifi and 3G on, it will last you a month.  That is just the right kind of appliance lifetime one wants. 

There are drawbacks of course.  The page forward and back buttons are on the edge of the device so it is quite easy to handle it and flip through several pages by mistake. If you happened to have the 2,500 books Amazon says you can load into the device, you'd have to use a search to find any book.  The contents listing is on a fixed font size and only gives you 10 items per page. SO finding something, even if you use place them in 'collections' or folders may end up taking some time.  There's no desktop to help you navigate.  But that's a theoretical gripe and not a problem I've yet reached. You can list items by title, author, collection and most recent first, which is decent enough.

Within any text you can jump to the beginning or the end, to the contents list, to the cover, to page and location. Jumping to page numbers doesn't seem to work in any of the books I've been reading, and one can understand why.  The page numbering must necessarily change with your layout choices. If you are searching for where you put a note, you need to remember the layout settings you were using when you wrote it otherwise yo will never find it with page number.  However, your note is stored (in My Clippings) along with its Location in the document, which is the thing you need to use, because locations are fixed places in the document regardless of page layout.

You have 8 font sizes and can toggle between condensed, sans serif and regular.  You can also set small, medium and large line spacing as well as words per line so your text display permutations are really quite generous.

I wasn't even aware that you could rotate the screen.  I cried with joy when I discovered it - very good for web browsing. It plays mp3 music while you read (if you are that sort of multitasking person).  It can speak text when you tire.  This is the very familiar Norwegian-like computer voice that I have on my macbook.  Perfectly good for science texts, newspapers and periodicals.  It can't speak fiction to save its life; it sounds like gobbledygook.  But who really wants it to anyway.

the keyboard covers a small area and the buttons are small, but it turns out that my finger nails have grown just enough to make typing possible - a whole lot easier that texting on a phone. Writing short notes to oneself is feasible.  They are linked to the text where you wrote them but are also saved along with the reference to the document and page number that they belong to in a single folder called My Clippings in which you can browse.

Looking at the unit, there seems to be a small hole between ear-phone plug and mini-USB socket.  I wonder if this is not a microphone or where a microphone will go one of these days. If it is Amazon's plan to upgrade these Kindles with a voice recording / phone function then I cannot see any reason why you would not want one.  A Kindle that can act like phone?  Now there's the kind of product up grade that is truly interesting.  Much better than a phone that tries to be an e-reader.

One gripe is that the Kindle texts are too expensive vis a vis the price of a new book. I don't see those prices holding, however.

There's more to talk about but I will leave it there.  A charming and useful gadget that I am very happy owning.