Amazon misses the mark (I think) with Kindle reading device...

[Vodka7]

Well, not even 24 hours after my post, my dad sent me an email to tell me he bought a Kindle.  I guess it makes sense for him as A) he has more money than he knows what to do with, B) he's always wanted to read books on a PDA but the screens were never big/sharp enough for him, and C) he trusts Amazon to sell books to him.

I think C is going to be the biggest thing for getting the Kindle adapted.  I don't want to buy *anything* from Sony after their CD rootkit DRM fiasco, and really, when you think about, just about everyone in America knows that Amazon sells books and does it well.  Although personally I think his money is more of an investment in the IDEA of buying books in a digital format than an investment in a good piece of hardware, it's nice that there are early adopters out there to make sure the rest of us will have a bandwagon to jump onto in the future.

[Perd Hapley]

just about everyone in America knows that Amazon sells books and does it well.

If they know what a book is.   

[Manedwolf]

From a review of it:

The Kindle is an off-white, asymmetrical tablet. Its screen is entirely gray-scale and never gets brighter than a dingy gray; images look as if they were printed in a Depression-era newspaper. Menus are navigated with a clunky up-and-down click-wheel, and when they load, the screen flashes black like a TI-82 calculato

Ow. That'd give me a headache real quick.

[RevDisk]

In all honesty, why not just make this a small carry-around book-reader/word processor/internet explorer/email-reader device.  That is all most people use a computer for anyway.  Add in a weak version of excel and solitaire and you are golden.

You are describing my Crackberry.

Seriously tho, while the screen is a bit small, I use it for every purpose you've outlined plus the telephone part.  With one device, I can email, IM, call, SMS or google someone from one menu.  I use it 99% for business purposes, but I also piped my main personal email account as well.  Decent support for third party apps.  The new model I'm getting next week has a camera and GPS built in.  Current one just has Wifi (which I do not use) and GPS (which has a nifty app called TeleNav that works quite well.) 

[Headless Thompson Gunner]

I thinkt he Kindle is a good idea.  I think the interface looks just fine, all the buttons are in the right places.  If the screen is easy on the eyes, and the battery life is good, I think it'd be a really handy gadget.  It takes all of those books you have laying around, unread, and keeps them close at hand at all times.  Sounds darned useful to me.

It definitely needs PDF support and a $50 pricer tag, though.

[Strings]

I keep several books that I like rereading on an SD card for my Palm T3 (ALWAYS in my pocket), for those "I need to kill some time" moments. Makes sense to me. however, I still like to have the bound paper book to sit down and read at home...

[Iain]

From a review of it:

...the screen flashes black like a TI-82 calculato

Ow. That'd give me a headache real quick.

E ink is like that. The real advantage is that once an 'image' has been displayed on the screen it requires no charge to keep it there, thus the huge battery life that no lcd device can match presently. The other advantage is that e ink is less of a strain on the eyes over time, it's nearer to reading text on a page than lcd is.

[AZRedhawk44]

A 90-degree angle where the heel of your hand goes when holding it is not ergonomics by any stretch of the imagination.

Yeah... I guess they should re-design the square edges on those pesky books, too.

I take issue with the price it is offered at, and the proprietary "whispernet" communications interface.  I want a dock I can hook it to my computer with.  Like a PDA-sync cradle.

And it needs to support PDF, and have a richtext (or better) document editor in it.

You want to replace paper?  Don't take away my ability to make notes about what I'm reading.  And make it easy to transfer those notes to my PC for me to utilize later in my paper/documentation/thesis/whatever.  While you're at it, format the footnote for me, per the Chicago style.

And make it two pages wide.