My new Amazon Kindle 2 arrived on Friday, but all I could do was take it out of the box and ooh and ahh over it - you have to charge it for three hours first.  At least I turned it on and let it register itself, but Day 1 really began Saturday morning.  Sort of like getting a new toy for Christmas, it was fun to look at it, play with the buttons, try to get it to work, read the user manual, etc.  But where I happened to be on Saturday morning is one of the few places in the world with no cell phone signal.  Without a cell phone signal, the Kindle can’t get new books.  First observation - it would be much better if it could use WiFi as well as the free WhisperNet network (read Sprint 3G cell phone network or slower regular cell networks).

So not having a live connection, I tried downloading some MP3 and Word files from my laptop with the Kindle USB cable.  That worked, but in order for the documents to show up, I found out I need to convert them to the Kindle format.  That happens via the WhisperNet connection (which I don’t have right now), or I can email them to a special email address and then copy them over via the USB cable.  The latter is actually free, the former is not free.  Second observation - I need to carry my laptop if I’m going to be out of cell service. Third observation - watch for the little hidden charges if I send documents to myself.

Next, I went into town “for groceries”, but really just to get a WhisperNet connection for my new toy.  The connected Kindle instantly downloaded the book I had selected (Dante’s Inferno, and a sample of a book on Hannibal in Italy).  The prices for the Kindle books are usually cheaper than the physical hardcover version - typically $9.99 for a lot of books, but all the free books are not that appealing - mostly they are from the 19th century.  There are some books that cost as much as $400 - reference books and such.  But, compared to a paperback, I can’t see paying $9.99.  Fourth observation - I won’t be buying a lot of books for my Kindle - they are still way too expensive. I’m inclined to spend $5.95 at the airport when I’m leaving for a trip, but not that interested in spending twice that much for the electronic version.  True that some books cost $0.99, but the fact is that the books you’d want to get are in the $10 range.

So at the end of the day, I had managed to get one book and a sample of another one, download an MP3 file, and impress the other members of my household with the new cool toy.  So far, this is still a toy.  But while fun, is it worth the cost to be able to read about Hannibal and Scipio while listening to Commander Cody’s “Hot Rod Lincoln”?  I couldn’t do that with just a paper version of the book, but I could with a paperback and iPod.  The jury is still out on this new gadget.

BTW - the quality of the type on the screen is as good as they said.

UPDATE - Six months later, I rarely ever use my Kindle.  I tried downloading documents and while it works, the quality of the rendering of images is not good enough.  I couldn’t read a diagram created in Visio and embedded in my Word doc as a WMF file.  I couldn’t read the diagrams or view the pictures in the PDF I downloaded.  However, I did use the web browser for directions to a church where a wedding was being held.  I just used Google map, and its directions - turns out the directions were slightly off and we went left instead of right, and were late for the wedding.  Kindle is not a GPS.  Who knew?

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 15th, 2009 at 10:59 am and is filed under New and Noteworthy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.