We’re now a 2-Kindle family. How awesome is the Kindle 3 (the gray one)? Let’s see:
- cheaper (as low as $139 for Wifi only)
- smaller
- lighter
- battery lasts twice as long
- contrast 50% better
- faster
As much as I loved the Kindle 2 I got several months ago, this one is way better. I see lots of my friends on Facebook asking, “Gee, should I get a Kindle or not?” Answer: if you 1.) like to read and 2.) travel frequently, you should get one immediately…
And yes, I understand if you like paper books better. But this thing weighs less than a paperback book, and you can bring your entire library – and add to it – wherever you go. And your dictionary and thesaurus too.
So don’t think about it as “should I read books on paper or the Kindle” – if you’re an avid reader, you should have BOTH. Kindle for travel and convenience, paper books for home. Here’s another analogy, if you’re old enough to remember vinyl – LPs were clearly superior to cassette tapes – they sounded better, the packaging was better. But you could bring a handful of tapes with you when you traveled, or listen to them in your car. So maybe you preferred vinyl – but if you liked music, you had both.
My one gripe with the Kindle – it doesn’t read RSS feeds! Not unless you pay for them, that is – Amazon is trying to get you to “subscribe” to “blogs” for $1.99 or more per month. And what you get is the RSS feed. It seems crazy to pay for something on a Kindle you get for free everywhere else. It’s a killer feature that Amazon should add immediately – the Kindle is almost a perfect text consumption device – the lack of ability to read RSS is a major drag…
NOTE: interestingly enough, the Kindle DOES have a browser built in. You can find it if you go “Home” then press “Menu” then scroll down to “Experimental”. So you can see a sort of half-assed version of web pages, read your mail on gmail or whatever, but apparently you can’t go to Feeburner or Google reader…hmmm…