Apr

8

2008

(2) Comments

Hands-On With the Kindle

11:12PM by Jim Frost

Yesterday I spoke a little about the basic qualities that I thought can make a successful e-book reader, and why the Amazon Kindle does a much better job at it than anything else to date.  Today I want to talk about the actual design of the device and what it’s like to live with it day-to-day.

There are a few things that I thought would drive me completely crazy, things that I thought were a big gamble when I bought the device.  Primary amongst those was that the electronic paper display flashes black with every page turn.

The flash turns out not to be strictly necessary; there are parts of the user interface that update without the flashing, e.g when typing or editing a search line.  Editing text leaves little dirty smudges, though, which would get distracting pretty fast.  The black flash “cleans” the display in preparation for writing new data on it.  They don’t have to flash the display, but it looks a lot better if they do.

So it flashes.  And it’s distracting ... for about ten or fifteen minutes.  Then your brain just forgets to notice it, just like it forgets to notice the distraction of turning a paper page.  It turns out that the flash is really not an issue at all.

Another thing that worried me was the delay when turning pages.  The electronic paper displays don’t update immediately like LCD.  The original Sony Reader, whose successor is the major competitor to the Kindle, took almost three seconds to turn a page.  That’s beyond distracting, it’s terrible.  The newer model improved that a lot, to about a second and a half, but that’s still much too slow in my opinion.  I expected similar performance from the Kindle but was surprised to find that page turns almost always take less than a second.  This is still long enough that flipping forward and backward several pages is annoying, but short enough to be quite similar to the time it takes to turn a paper page.  As with paper I find myself tapping the “next page” button as I read the last line or two of text and it flips just as I get to the end.  I wish it were faster, but it’s fast enough ... most of the time.

Where you’ll really notice the delay is any time there is a picture on the next page.  It typically takes about three seconds to turn a page in that case, and it really throws off the reading rhythm.  Pictures are not common in Kindle books, however, for reasons I’ll get to in a little while, so this is not a crippling problem but rather an occasional annoyance.

So: The flash and the delay turn out to be more or less non-issues in daily use, quite a surprise.  What I didn’t expect, however, was that a number of what I considered small design issues would be constant annoyances.

A lot of reviewers have trashed the Kindle’s design as something out of the 1970’s.  It’s true that the white plastic case is not in vogue, but in person, rather than in pictures, the design looks angular and sleek, not dated.  The wedge-shaped design is intended to evoke the feel of a book, a topic I’ll get back to in a little while.

The design of the unit has one huge Achilles heel that many reviewers have pointed out, and I’m going to follow the crowd here.  About 75% of the left and right sides of the device are taken up by navigation buttons—“next page” buttons on either side, a large “previous page” button on the left, and a small “back” button on the right.  Big page-turning buttons are a great idea, you’re going to be doing that all the time, so I don’t fault them for that.  I am not sure why they chose to make the “previous page” button so darn large, but in practice it doesn’t really seem to make much difference so that is neither here nor there.  What is really terrible is that these buttons wrap around the edges of the device.  With almost all of two sides of the device being active buttons it is nearly impossible to handle the book without turning pages, and for awhile I was constantly losing my place when I accidentally hit this or that button just handling the device.  If there is one design change I would make, it would be to move the buttons just a little inboard from the edges.

There is, however, a fairly simple solution to this problem.  The kindle comes with a (real!) leather cover.  When the cover is on the device you can fold it backward on itself, behind the Kindle.

When in this position you can handle the unit entirely by the cover, easily avoiding accidental keypresses.  For this reason I recommend always using the cover, although it is also a good way to protect the e-book from handling and drop damage.

While I’m on the topic of the cover, it has a design that I have to call crazy-stupid.  Amazingly the cover doesn’t attach firmly to the Kindle at all.  Instead, the Kindle slides into two leather cups at the top and bottom left.

It’s held in place somewhat precariously by a little plastic tab that fits into a slight depression in the back of the Kindle.

This arrangement holds the two pieces together better than I expected it to, but I have to believe they could have designed something that works a lot better.  If it were me I would have used some kind of locking pin system, perhaps even a hinge.  Many people supplement the locking tab with velcro strips, a cheap and practical solution that I may eventually use myself.

Another problem with this design is that the slot on the back of the Kindle is actually a removable piece: It covers the battery and Secure Digital flash card slot.  By itself the cover snaps in securely and you’re not likely to dislodge it, but with the cover on it’s pretty easy to pull the cover off with rough handling.  Once the back cover separates the leather cover comes away from the Kindle and you have three pieces in your hands.  This would have been avoided if the slot were part of the Kindle itself rather than the battery cover.

Another knock on the Kindle’s design that I’ve seen in a lot of reviews is Amazon’s choice to hide the SD card slot inside of the back cover.  It’s much more difficult to insert and remove the card this way.  The question they don’t seem to ask, though, is why you would want or need to remove the card frequently.

The Kindle has about 180MB of free space for storing books when it comes out of the box.  A typical book is between 500K and 1M, meaning that you can store more than 200 of them.  That’s a lot of books!  It’s about twice as many as I managed to accumulate on my Palm over ten years, although nowhere near as many as I have in paper.  If you want to store more, though, just toss in an SD card.  I had a 2GB SD card laying around, which I loaded up with all of the Mobipocket and PRC e-books I had accumulated for my Palm, and stuck it in.  Instantly the device became capable of holding a moderately large personal library, around 2,500 books.  With that kind of storage I don’t expect to be swapping SD cards any time soon, and since the Kindle acts as its own USB drive there is really no reason to ever remove the SD card.  Moreover, by hiding the slot inside of the cover it is protected from dirt and dust (and coins; I once got a nickle stuck in the SD card slot of my Palm!).  Contrary to most reviews I think this was a wise design decision.

Unfortunately I have found that it is possible to dislodge the SD card with a sharp enough impact.  It hasn’t happened often, but when it does happen the Kindle will forget about any books on the card, and sometimes behaves very oddly.  I have had a couple of instances where it took me a few minutes to figure out where half of my books disappeared to.  I’m not sure Amazon can do much about this, but it’s something you’re likely to have happen once in awhile.

That covers all of the things that I found to be particularly bothersome, with one exception: The click-wheel interface.

Because the electronic paper updates so slowly you can’t use any kind of pointer that is on the display itself and still have really interactive response.  Sony dealt with this problem by providing a row of buttons down the side of the reader, a simple and effective solution.  Amazon took a different approach.  They put a thin LCD display down the right side of the display, and use a click-wheel to move a selector bar up and down it.  The LCD is very unusual: It looks kind of like quicksilver, very reflective.  When you first see it you’ll go “Wow!  That’s neat!” I’ve never seen anything like it.  But, after a few minutes, you’ll start to wonder why the heck they didn’t just use a normal black LCD.

As you can (or rather can’t) see, the reflective indicator next to “Menu” in this photo is practically invisible, as it is any time it’s reflecting a white surface (for instance, acoustic tile or a white wall—not that those are common or anything).  I find myself tilting the Kindle this way and that in order to see where the indicator is on a regular basis.  If it were a normal LCD it would be very clear.  It’s hard to see how Amazon didn’t notice this problem during testing, but perhaps they went for something unusual just so people would talk about it.

Beyond that, there is the click-wheel.  I have to say right away that I am not a fan of click-wheel interfaces.  Maybe it’s just because I’m a bit of a spaz, but I find that I often roll the wheel as I’m trying to click.  As a result I often select the wrong thing.  The Kindle’s click-wheel has a good, notchy, resistance to accidental turns but I still manage to miss my selection once in awhile.

Still, the click-wheel means fewer parts compared to the Sony design, and the LCD selector is nice because it can be used for all kinds of things.  When the Kindle is loading a book it’s a progress indicator.  When the Kindle is attached to a computer via USB it’s an activity indicator.  If the selection is large the indicator grows, if it’s small it shrinks.  Because the indicator can be very small it can pick individual lines of text, a capability used for highlighting and dictionary lookups.  On the whole I think it’s a better design that Sony’s despite the click-wheel.

Given that the Kindle uses the click wheel to select lines on the display it is a bit surprising that the LCD display is on the right, rather than the left.  When selecting a chapter to jump to, or a newspaper article to read, it is often the case that there is a lot of white space between the text signifying the selection and the LCD panel.  This can make it difficult to pick the right line, and I do often end up choosing the article right before or right after the one I really intended when reading the morning paper.

I am pretty sure Amazon chose this design because most readers are right-handed, thus requiring the click-wheel to be on the right.  I think it would have been better to put the LCD display on the left, even though the splitting of the position of the click-wheel and LCD would tend to disassociate themselves from one another when you first pick up the device.  You’d figure it out easily and the selector would be much easier to use.  Sony has this same problem, by the way, but they solved it by using graphics to connect the button to the selection, much like many bank ATM machines do.  Amazon should do the same if they’re going to keep the current design.

That’s all I have space for today.  Tomorrow I’ll get into the actual reading experience as well as talk about buying and downloading books in Reading Books On The Kindle.

aikyrie said on 04/09/08 08:53AM

oldgollum said on 09/05/08 12:30AM