Monday, August 30, 2010

New Kindle versus iPad

Finally I got my Kindle (the new one) for $189. It is pretty light, much much lighter than the iPad and the setup was easy for wifi. 3G is free and working from the beginning. Because I bought the kindle from Amazon it was configured with my Amazon account. The kindle offers over 600,000 books, 137 newspapers world wide (even the Frankfurter Allgemeine from Germany), 71 magazines and over 10,000 blogs.

I actually did first not know if on the kindle was a sticker or if the screen on. The text on it just looks like a piece of paper (silver paper). I tried to touch the screen till I remembered that it is no touchscreen.
The Kindle has as well a browser, a music player and text to speech under experimental topic.
The Browser is pretty useles, anything which moves on the screen is not readable and the mouse jumps to navigation points by hitting the arrow keys, but not in any useful way. The text to speech is metallic and does not work with foreign text.
No wonder these parts are experimental. At the end the kindle is an ebook and not a computer.

Reading books with the kindle is interesting, the text is so clear and easy to read, however the load of a new page is annoying, the refresh is like making the whole page black and switches. This takes almost a second.
The screen is 7 inch which is only 3 inch less than the iPad but seems so much less. For me it is too small to read books. I never liked neither small paper books.
Reading outside in the sun at the beach is great, it does not matter how bright the sun is.
But reading in the bed is only possible if you have a nightlight or if you buy one of the expensive covers with built-in light.
Magazines are no fun to read, neither newspapers. They are basically build like a book. You have to go through the index page to see what articles are in the magazine, when you buy a subscription it loads always the first article instead of showing the index/content page.
Pictures are rare and pretty bad quality.
The wifi and 3G is so much slower than with the iPad.




If I would not have had my iPad since 4 months and I would only know such devices as book readers, i would love the kindle. But since I saw what else a device with 10 inch screen and much lighter as a notebook can do, I am not impressed. I use my iPad to read magazines which look much more like real magazines with full color images and videos.
But as well I read books with it, yes hard in the sun to use but at least I don't need a light when reading a book in the bed. But the best part is that i switch many times between books and internet. Whenever i find something in the book I want to research, I can do it easy with iPad.
And then all other things I can do, like watching movies, playing games or downloading over 250,000 applications.

The iPad costs at least 2.5 more than the kindle. But has for me a minimum of 10 times more useful functions. The iPad needs to be charged 10 times more often than the kindle, but even using the iPad daily I seldom need to charge it every day.

I am a power user, therefore or gave the kindle to my mother in law, she loves books. She said the kindle is ok, but she is missing email, toddler games and web surfing. She went with the iPad. She is 69 years young.
My son (as i wrote in an earlier blog) is an iPad master, playing his learning games. He does not show any interests in the kindle and does not know how the kindle works. He's 30 months old.

A device which can entertain all generation in a house is at the end much more cheaper than having a netbook, a leap frog and a kindle at the same time to serve everybody's need and still not looking cool.
The really funny part is, that the kindle app on the iPad looks better than the kindle because images are in such good color quality.

BTW
It took my 30 minutes to connect my kindle to twitter and facebook. You can do this only over the kindle browser and it is horrible, i even don't know how was able to do it at the end.

- Posted using My iPad

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