Amazon is showing the Kindle 2 right now. The two biggest advances are: 1. Syncing your current page across devices. So if you are reading on your phone and then pickup your Kindle you can start right where you left off. 2. Text to Speech. The book will read itself to you. So you can be reading your book and then have it read itself to you while you drive to the store. Those two features will make the device much closer to the dream device I previously described.
I’m fairly underwhelmed by the Kindle.
-non portable format
-not in Europe
I saw a presentation of a reader from Plastic Logic that totally kick Kindle’s ***!
http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid980795693/bctid1778578839
My problem with these reader is that they force you to read linearly. It works for leisure reading like novels, but not for research purposes. It is hard to skim or compare multiple pages. I would like the option to minimize pages to 25% or 50% size and have 2-4 random pages of the same book side by side.
@adora – I like the form factor of the Plastic Logic device, but the real test of any device is how easy it is to get content for it. The Kindle seems to win on that account. It sounds like they will eventually have the ability to sync where you are reading across multiple devices. So I can read on my Blackberry while waiting at the doctor’s office and pick up exactly where I left off with the Kindle later.
RIght now I’m using a Sony Reader, but much of the content I subscribe to is available on the Kindle (Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review), but not on the Reader.
@Niels – Amazon made another announcement last week that they are planing on bringing Kindle content to the iPhone and other mobile devices. This should help with making the content more portable while still getting publishers to agree to have their content available in the format.
The speaker on the Kindle is not powerful enough to be easily heard while driving a car. If you want your Kindle 2.0 to read to you, you need to wear headphones, which is not legal while driving a car. Get the book on CD. Not to mention the havoc that a computer-driven text-to-speech program would have with many names (like mine, for instance – even my real name is mis-pronounced by computers).
I have a Kindle, and what annoys me the most about other Kindle owners is the whining about what they want.
The Kindle plays music, but the files are shuffled, so audio books aren’t read in chapter order. So plop $50 down for an iPod shuffle or other MP3 player and use that. It’s MEANT to play audio files – the Kindle isn’t.
The Kindle doesn’t have a color screen. I don’t read many books with pictures, let alone color pictures, so who cares?
It’s not backlit. Well, no, because e-ink doesn’t work with backlighting, and besides, that would defeat the purpose of an ebook that looks and reads like a real book – meaning no eyestrain from glare.
It doesn’t work outside the US. Actually it does – you just have to plug it into your computer to download content. It’s not like the old days when you had to put the phone handset into that big box of a modem and rely on a 4 kbps connection. But I can see where plugging it into a computer would be more trouble for some people than carting a suitcase full of books, magazines, and newspapers along on their whirlwind tour of Belgium.
I like a lot about the first Kindle, but the thing that drove us all COMPLETELY NUTS was the page buttons on the edge. There was no comfortable way to hold it without accidentally changing the page!