I bought an Amazon Kindle 2 earlier this year. I’ve now read several novels and a bunch of short stories on it, as well as two magazines and a newspaper. I feel I know the device well enough to be able to review it. Mobile phones are all about bling. Fancy cases, custom screensavers, custom ringtones, and so on. The iPhone has upped the ante as far as bright candy-colored animated buttons, slick animations, and throwaway gimmick applications.
Dear Amazon, You’re so almost there with your new Kindle e-book. There are just a few minor details you need to fix to get me on board. First of all, you need Mac support, and preferably Linux support as well, both for content creation and for reading books. There’s really no excuse for not having reader support, as you have a working Mobipocket reader in Java that will run on Mac and Linux, you just haven’t taken the time to package it up properly.
My previous PDA was a Palm V. 16MHz 68000, 160×160 B&W screen that could do greyscale in special modes that most software didn’t use. I didn’t particularly want to replace it, but there were a few issues I was having. First off, the fact that it was serial based rather than USB meant it was a pain to connect to any modern computer; getting it hooked up to the Mac involved a USB to serial adaptor, special drivers, and a lot of futzing with Palm Desktop, and the end result was painfully slow.