Hands-On with Kindle

As a follow-up to my earlier blog, I happened to get 15 minutes hands-on use of the Amazon Kindle, their new portable eBook reader. As it happens, Amazon’s Lab 126 development team is located in the same building as MySQL’s US headquarters, and so when I happened to spot a team of folks with a Kindle in hand at a local restaurant for lunch, I dove in and asked if I could try it out.

First point to note: the display is fantastic. To me, it’s as easy to read as a book. While you can argue that the text is dark grey rather than black, it has excellent contrast. The underlying e-Ink technology has improved since its first introduction in the Sony Reader, but there is still a split-second flash of black when you turn the page which detracts from the smoothness and shatters the illusion of it being a real book. (Imagine if your ipod hiccuped every minute while playing music.)

Also, the device is not nearly so ugly in person as it might appear in photos. In fact I’d say it looks kind of cool, especially given the quality of the display. The Kindle may not be as elegant as an iPhone, but you’re not going to feel like you’re lugging a 1980’s Kaypro around. The cover is a bit cumbersome and to me adds some unnecessary bulk, but that may just be a matter of personal taste. Overall, the Kindle is lightweight and easy to hold and operate in one hand. Performance appears to be quite good and downloading sample chapters or entire books is a snap. The user interface is not quite as elegant as an iPhone, but in about 5 minutes you know everything you need to know to use it.

My limited hands-on evaluation does not change the fact that at $400 the Kindle is still very expensive. If for that price it included some kind of Netflix-style book subscription, then I would probably go for it. But at $400 plus $10 a pop on books, the economics don’t work for me. I don’t have the need to carry more than 2-3 books at a time when I travel, and I’m willing to trade off convenience for price at this point. But if you’re schlepping ten pounds of reference books around, then you may view it differently.

And as my lunch companion pointed out: if you’ve already got a cell phone, a Blackberry, an iPod and a laptop, then adding one more device seems like overkill. But if the Kindle could be a general purpose browser and email device, that would be a different story.

Maybe that’s Kindle 2.0?