Amazon’s new “Kindle is the first e-book reader that allows you to select, buy and download titles directly to the device, instead of downloading them to a PC first and then transferring them over. Amazon is offering a large collection of digitized books — about 90,000 — compared with fewer than 25,000 for Sony. The Kindle also can download newspapers, magazines and blogs directly, and update them automatically. This is possible because the Kindle comes with free, built-in wireless Internet access, using a cellular data network,” Walter S. Mossberg reports for The Wall Street Journal.
“I’ve been testing the Kindle for about a week, and I love the shopping and downloading experience. But the Kindle device itself is just mediocre,” Mossberg reports. “While it has good readability, battery life and storage capacity, both its hardware design and its software user interface are marred by annoying flaw.”
“The device is poorly designed. It has huge buttons on both edges for turning pages forward or backward. They are way too easy to press accidentally, so my reading was constantly being interrupted by unwanted page turns. Plus, the buttons are confusing. One called ‘Back’ doesn’t actually move to the previous page, but supposedly to the prior function. I never could predict what it would do,” Mossberg reports.
“The software interface also is clumsy,” Mossberg reports. “Amazon has nailed the electronic-book shopping experience. But it has a lot to learn about designing electronic devices.”
Full article here.
How Microsoftian! A product that’s clumsy and poorly designed with badly-labeled, unpredictable buttons, which is adroit only at getting the suckers who bought into it to waste more of their money.