James Kendrick of jkOnThe Run likes his new Kindle but has problems with accidentally pressed buttons and screen contrast. More details here and here. See him use basic commands and—as I suspected—easily buy a book. While the Kindle is a standards nightmare, I completely agree with JK’s conclusion that Amazon designed the Kindle for novices. From afar, I believe that Amazon mostly succeeded. Now, if only we can turn Jeff Bezos around on .epub and a few other details. (Thanks to Mike Cane for the pointer.)

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2 COMMENTS

  1. I really haven’t had any issues with the screen contrast, even in low light. I think, though, the screen contrast is not as good as the Sony Reader which I know you’ve complained about as being insufficient, so you might find the Kindle to have very inadequate contrast as well.

    It can be especially awkward going back a page while the device is in the cover. For righties, like me, we’re cradling the book in the left hand and using the right hand to navigate. But although there is a “Next Page” button on the right hand side of the device, the “Previous Page” button is on the left hand side of the device.

    Instead of a “Previous page” button, they have that stupid “Back” button on the right which acts like a browser back button …so it takes you to the last operation not page. It gets very confusing at times anticipating exactly where you’re going to go when you hit the Back button, which is indicative of a very poor design.

    And he’s absolutely right about there needing to be a hardware bookmark button.

  2. BTW, while we’re highlighting some of the shortcomings, one of the things that Amazon got very right is the Search function. This is a thing of beauty.

    Do an initial Search, and the Kindle shows you a list of all e-books on the device that contain that string, along with how many times the string appears. Then click on one of those books from the search menu, and it shows each instance of that string in the book in context (3 line excerpt) that you can click on.

    No idea how it will scale when I’ve got 2 thousand books on there, but right now it is very fast and very well implemented.

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