Amazon has released Kindle, its new e-book reader.
[Later update: my Kindle review is online now.]
Newsweek has published a lengthy article about it. CNET's coverage includes a review, a photo gallery, a Crave blog, and a News.com blog. That's plenty of factual coverage.
Amazon's Kindle e-book reader
(Credit: Amazon.com)I won't rehash the basic features of Kindle, but I will try to compare it with the Sony Reader--now in its second generation and Kindle's primary competition. I will also talk about what I see as the strong and weak points of the Kindle design.
Disclaimer: This is all based on what I've seen and read. I haven't seen a Kindle in person. Yet.
First, I'm surprised by Kindle's industrial design. The unit has the same screen as Sony's Reader (or one with identical specifications), but Kindle is much, much larger overall--longer, wider, and more than twice as thick. Yet somehow it's only 1.4 ounces heavier--10.4 ounces vs. 9 ounces. The Sony Reader feels solid; I suspect Kindle will feel lighter than it is.
Kindle includes a keyboard to aid in searching stored content and browsing the Kindle e-book store. The keyboard, however, looks like it'll be in the way of reading, which is Kindle's primary purpose. The other buttons also look awkwardly placed to me--the page-turning buttons, for example, are on the right and left edges. They're so large that they basically are the left and right edges.
To my eye, Kindle is fairly ugly. Angular shapes, sharp edges, weird button placements, etc. I'm not all that impressed by the design of Sony's Reader either, but I think it looks much better.
Amazon appears to have devoted some of that extra volume to shock protection; Amazon's Kindle page includes a video of drop testing. I'm all in favor of such protection. I am constantly worried about my Sony Reader getting broken just from normal use--that's exactly what happened to my first-generation Reader, and Sony asked almost the same price to repair it as the cost of a new unit.
Also, Kindle seems to be pretty much limited to a vertical (portrait) orientation; there's no mention of landscape mode in the user guide (which is available online as a PDF). Sony's Reader works fairly well in landscape mode, which helps a little with extra-wide documents, especially in PDF format. But Sony's PDF viewer is pretty awful, so that advantage often isn't enough.
I'll give Amazon credit for trying something new as part of Kindle's design--the "cursor bar," a tall, skinny display alongside the main one that works with a scroll wheel to select on-screen menu options. The Reader has 10 buttons down the side of the screen; menu options are physically aligned. Kindle's cursor bar appears to be more flexible. Whether it's as easy to use remains to be seen, but I appreciate the fact that Amazon is trying to innovate.
The other surprising thing was Amazon's decision to use a mobile broadband connection through Sprint's EV-DO cellular data network...and to shield users from all the complexities of that service. It's called "Amazon Whispernet," which is a strange name, but what the heck. Customers don't have to maintain a separate cell phone account; there are no bills. The cost of browsing Amazon's Kindle e-book store is covered by Amazon; download costs are built into the price of the books, newspapers, blog feeds, and other services available from Amazon.
This isn't a completely new business model; cell phone companies have offered similar deals for a while, but this is the first time I've seen this approach applied to mobile broadband. There is some risk to Amazon; it could be expensive to support Kindle users who browse a lot but don't buy much.
I wasn't surprised to see that Amazon is suddenly the world's best place to buy e-books. Most New York Times bestsellers and other new releases are $9.99 or less. I searched Amazon's Kindle store and found thousands of titles at or under a dollar, although many of these were individual stories or articles. As a specific example, the novel Burning Tower by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, released in December 2006, is priced at $5.59 in the Kindle store.
There's no need for a PC; everything can be handled through Whispernet. Amazon even keeps track of your purchases so you can download them again later if you have to replace or re-initialize your Kindle for some reason.
If you do have a PC, you can transfer files via USB. There's also an SD card slot. Kindle natively supports only a few different file types, however, so I hope that situation improves soon. Several other file types can be handled via translation, including Microsoft Word, PDF, and HTML documents and JPEG, GIF, PNG, and BMP image files. Sony has a slight edge here with native PDF and RTF support, and possibly a bigger edge once Adobe Systems' Digital Editions is available for the Reader, but I'll have to get my hands on one to see if Amazon's translation service works well enough to substitute for broader native file-type support.
I should be able to figure that out by Wednesday. Regular readers here can probably guess what's coming next--yes, I bought a Kindle. I couldn't resist! Stay tuned for a Gizmo Report as soon as I've had a chance to make detailed comparisons with my Reader.
Starting this month, five Hewlett-Packard business notebooks will be come packaged with Sprint's mobile broadband network.
The HP Compaq 2710p convertible notebook, 6510b, 6910p, 8510p notebooks and 8510w mobile work station, are the first offerings from HP to be eligible for embedded Sprint service. Prices for the five models range between $959 and $2,049. HP says to expect additional models to be added later this year.
The companies will jointly market the notebooks, which will have access to Sprint's 3G EV-DO network beginning sometime in October. Customers who sign up for a one- or two-year service agreement will get one free month of service from Sprint.
AT&T says it has spent an additional $50 million in the months leading up to the iPhone launch to upgrade and add more capacity to its 2.5G EDGE network, but a company official said that subscribers shouldn't expect to surf the mobile Net any faster.
"We don't want to set unrealistic expectations," said Mark Siegel, a spokesman for AT&T. "We have been upgrading the network on an ongoing basis, and we've made an additional investment in anticipation of demand for the iPhone."
AT&T has spent over $16 billion since 2005 upgrading the EDGE network.
The iPhone has been criticized for the fact that it works on AT&T's 2.5G network instead of its faster 3G network. But in the last few days, some AT&T subscribers have been reporting noticeably faster data speeds using their 2.5G handsets. And there has been speculation that AT&T gave EDGE a "boost" in the days and weeks leading up to the launch, which happens Friday at 6 p.m. local time.
But AT&T's Siegel said that what customers are likely experiencing are bursts in speed.
"The connection speed depends on so many things," he said. "It depends on the site you're connecting to or the size of the file you're downloading. And sometimes users experience bursts that are above what is typical."
He said the company has not changed what it cites as the average data rates for the EDGE network. He said on average subscribers should expect between 100 kilobits per second and 130kbps.
But even if some users get bursts of faster speeds from time to time, the EDGE network is still much slower than a 3G network. AT&T's 3G network, which uses a technology called HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access), gets average data rates of between 400kbps and 700kbps. Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel, which use a 3G technology called EV-DO (Evolution Data Optimized), also offer data rates between 400kbps and 700kbps.
So unfortunately, for all the soon-to-be iPhone users, AT&T hasn't magically increased the speed of its network. For truly faster speeds, iPhone fans will have to wait for the next-generation device that will work on a 3G network.
Qwest Wireless customers will soon be able to wirelessly surf the Net at 3G speeds on their laptops.
The company says it will offer its customers wireless broadband service using Sprint Nextel's evolution data optimized (EVDO) network. Qwest has been using the Sprint wireless network to provide nationwide coverage for its cellular subscribers since 2003. Now the carrier will be able to offer nationwide broadband wireless too.
Qwest Mobile Broadband customers can choose one of three plans based on the amount of data they will be uploading or downloading. Service plans start at $70 a month. The unlimited plan costs $80, but according to Qwest?s terms and conditions the service is capped at 5 gigabytes of data transmission per month. So it's not really unlimited.
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