Hands-on Review: Amazon Kindle

Last week, Amazon's Kindle made a huge splash, with pundits galore (including myself) making bold pronouncements about the device without having touched it. Well, I've had one for several days now and have refined my opinions on the device. Is it worth $400 of your holiday (or personal) shopping budget? Read on.

First, I would be remiss without saying that, yes, the Kindle looks much better in person than it does in photos. Considerably better. The problem in pictures is really that gray-looking section on the right side. That is actually a trick of light in photos. In reality, the Kindle is all white with the exception of the rubberized panel on the backside (which helps you grip it), and it honestly looks quite attractive on the whole once you have one in your sweaty palms. Yes, there's room for improvement: The odd angles (meant, I'm guessing, to evoke a paperback book with the cover folded back) are kind of goofy, and the swirling keypad buttons are just silly. That said, you almost never touch those buttons in daily use: The previous and next page buttons and the click wheel are about it.

After a quick bit of training as you read the manual (preloaded on the device), Kindle (which I invariably call "Kimble") becomes fairly intuitive. There's a vertical bar next to the screen, and you use the scroll wheel to move a silvery icon up and down that bar. When it's next to a menu option you want or a sentence you want to bookmark, you click the wheel for additional options. But reading a book, once purchased through a brainlessly simple process, is largely a matter of clicking "next page" until you reach the end.

I am less thrilled about the screen. In dim light, the black-on-gray display is far from perfect. Next to my laptop screen it's like night and day, literally. Kindle is no replacement for paper—not yet, anyway—when it comes to high-definition print and images, but I am certain electronic ink will improve over time. Still, it's very light and easy to handle in a single hand, and reading for extended periods is no problem, provided there's enough light. (Are Kindle book lights already on the market?)

One of Kindle's potentially killer features is the ability to load your own content onto the device. It costs 10 cents to send a document to your Kindle: You just email it as an attachment to your custom @kindle.com email address, and Kindle does the rest, translating it and sending it wirelessly to your reader. (Did I mention that access-anywhere-at-no-charge wireless feature is killer?) I sent a full 250-page book I wrote in DOC format to my Kindle; it showed up completely flawlessly in a matter of minutes. That said, Amazon really needs to get a PDF translator working for Kindle ASAP.

On the downside, I never once got the "experimental" web browsing or Wikipedia search feature to work on the Kindle--just blank pages every time. Man, I'd love a web browser in the Kindle... and I'm hopeful a software update down the line will get it working. (UPDATE: A manual restart resolved this issue; web browsing now works.)

Then there's the price. At $399 for the hardware and $10 for most book downloads, it isn't cheap. At $199, Kindle would be a holiday hit, but at $399 you've got to be a voracious reader (or someone who needs to carry thousands of pages of documents with him at all times) in order to justify the price. Sony's competitor (sans wireless) is only $299 and is otherwise comparable; when's the last time Sony was the budget choice in any market? Still, for the word-obsessed, Kindle is at least a fun novelty and at best a game-changing device. Once you get into Kindle's mindset, it's awfully hard to look at books the way you used to.