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Review: Amazon Reader Needs More Juice
Sony's Reader was difficult to navigate because the e-ink display is slow to react to the user _ switching between menu options took a second, for instance. The Kindle, however, uses a nifty secondary display to get around this problem. It's a thin strip that runs alongside of the main display. A scroll wheel controls a cluster of silvery squares that run up and down the strip, indicating the user's choices on the main display. It's both strange and attractive, yet is based on lightning-fast liquid-crystal display technology.
The rest of the interface is less convincing. Amazon has strained to make it easy to turn to the next page, and gone overboard: It's hard to grab the device without turning a page, because the buttons are so large, covering most of both sides of the Kindle.
  The Kindle device is shown in this photograph released by Amazon.com on Monday, Nov. 19, 2007. The $399 electronic book device will allow downloads of more than 90,000 book titles, blogs, magazines and newspapers. (AP Photo/Amazon.com) (AP) TOOLBOXCOMMENT |
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It's also poorly configured for reading while held in just the right hand. If you overshoot, you need to bring up your left hand to press the "Previous Page" button.
But I'm willing to overlook some of those weird design choices, because the Kindle has some really cool features. For instance, the full-alphabet keyboard below the screen allows you to (slowly) type in words to search for in your books. You can annotate what you read. You can wirelessly send questions to a team of editors, who will grab answers for you from the Web and send them back to you for free. There's even a rudimentary Web browser that allows you to surf for free.
You can also bring your own documents along on the Kindle, though this ability is somewhat limited. By connecting it to a computer, you can transfer plain text files. If you want to bring PDFs or Microsoft Word documents, you have to e-mail them to Amazon, which converts them and sends them to the Kindle over the wireless network for 10 cents each. In my test, Portable Document Format files with text in columns were garbled in the conversion.
The real reason I can't recommend the Kindle is the battery issue. It's quite possible that Amazon could apply some simple fix, like a software upgrade, because the battery life is much shorter than its components seem to warrant.
If not, we'll have to wait for the next attempt at making a great e-book reader. Like a great white whale of the electronics world, it seems ever elusive.
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On the Net:
Sony Reader: http:/
