Kindle is a lovely thing

Travelling is a natural hazard of doing business, so it was a nice surprise yesterday when my wife presented me with a shiny new Kindle as an early birthday present.

It really is much better than I expected, and Amazon are clearly taking a page out of Apple’s book in terms of both the industrial design and the packaging (although shipping through USPS, with “Kindle” emblazoned across the box doesn’t make much sense - the first one they sent was stolen)

Anyway, I immediately proceeded to download the Economist, and what a nice surprise at how readable and how easy the whole process is.

Clearly this is an innovation that makes sense for the Amazon brand - taking their core of books and moving them firmly into the 21st century.

Is the Kindle perfect? No, absolutely not. I couldn’t help wanting to get online with it, and when reading articles on the New York Times, I really wanted to be able to Tweet the one’s I liked straight from the page.

Ah well, perhaps in the next firmware update.

Until then, I’ll be getting on a plane to Japan tomorrow about 20lb’s lighter than I otherwise would be.

(Paul Worthington)