In hindsight it was always going to happen: we had seen the leaked pictures and the sheer weight of good taste pressuring down on the product development team at Amazon meant that the Kindle would have to get a redesign. But it was still a relief to see that the “retro cool” of the original has been discarded on what is known as Kindle 2. Angular and unsightly, the old Kindle has been replaced by a smoother, sleeker, cleaner, rounder, more focused, crisp and above all iPodesque looking machine. The brushed metal back is a particularly nice touch and the wayward paddles that made Kindle 1 difficult to hold have been moved down slightly, which should make it somewhat easier to use. It even has an ickle joystick navigation “rocker”.
For me all the rest of the new features are secondary (other than perhaps the voice to speech). Design is about usability and desirability; ebook readers will be made or broken on these facets and up till now have had a deficit of both.
A better display, more memory, the ability to sync bookmarks etc etc. Fine. What really matters is that the Kindle has moved from being an eccentrically interesting object to own, to being an object that is actively desirable, the difference perhaps between the Microsoft Zune and the iPod. Yes that’s the second time I’ve dropped the iBomb; no, I am not saying this is the (no doubt apocryphal) “iPod moment”.
Just that it’s a step in the right direction, and in device terms at least, that direction is the iPod.
Anyway. There is loads of coverage, as I’m sure you’ve seen: here are reports from Engadget, the Bookseller, the Guardian and Techcrunch.
2 Comments
The reaction in NY was much less about whether the new design was better and much more about the new text-to-speech functionality. Amazon call it a software feature; publishers call it a potential threat to their audio publishing business. Notably absent at the press conference was any mention of if/when the EU Kindle will show up.
Text-to-speech functionality would be nice – but for languages like Danish (or Ducth, Swedish, etc.), I guess speech technology wont be quite as good as for English (or French, german, etc.). But as long as the Kindle cannot be bought in Denmark, the text-to-speech-problem doesn’t seem that important. The EU Kindle was discussed (or: mentioned) in “the last session in the smallest room” dealing with topics from the TOC tag cloud.