Mini review of the Amazon Kindle [Update 2]

imgp3517.JPG

Why the name Kindle? Well, according to the definition on the Kindle box, “2. inspire, stir up.” Amazon is certainly making a buzz today. The form factor of the Kindle is nice. The textured backing is quite nice and the graphics are pretty neat. So far I like the Kindle. It’s very easy to use and the UI is clean. It’s sort of sluggish when jumping from screen to screen, but e-paper is much better than anything else out there. Refresh rate is wicked fast. Maybe it’s not that slow. I’m writing this as I’m playing with it so bear with me.

The store is nicely laid out as you can see from the above photo. The scroll wheel is just a scroll wheel, but it works. Monthly subscriptions to newspapers will cost you $13.99 and a single issue is $0.75. Magazines are $1.49 a month and $0.49 per issue. The search functionality works across the Web, Wikipedia, dictionary and the Kindle Store. Wikipedia looks great. The Web looks pretty good. The only thing I don’t like so far is the keyboard. It’s not ergonomically correct because the keys are all the way at the bottom. I don’t like the split in between. It takes a bit of time for text to pop up and deleting anything you type is frustrating because you may hit delete one too many times. So far that’s it. Once I download some books and all that jazz, I’ll have a more in depth review up. Enjoy the pics.

Update: A few more details after the jump.

Supports audio
Doesn’t support PDF
Battery can be replaced
Only supports SD
Charges over USB
That’s it so far, I’m sure there’s more, but we’ll get to that later.

Joel has a good list of tidbits about the Kindle so check them out.

imgp3518.JPG

imgp3519.JPG

imgp3520.JPG

imgp3521.JPG