Amazon just came out with a “wireless reading device” called Kindle. Kindle has an electronic paper display and this should make reading easier on the eyes than say reading from an LCD screen. You can buy books and have them delivered wirelessly. For this Kindle uses Sprint EVDO. Pretty nifty!
The Amazon Kindle page has a nice video demonstration (scroll down past the product overview). The one thing that worried me at first was that the video implies that, if you want to read your own Word or PDF documents, you need to pay Amazon to convert them to a format Kindle can read, and then email the converted document directly to your Kindle. As it turns out, Kindle can read unprotected Mobipocket files and you can create these with a free tool from Mobipocket. You can then move these files to Kindle from your computer via a USB connection. So, while you certainly can just email the files to your Kindle (or someone else’s) you can just take care of the conversion and transfer yourself. Phew.
Some of the nice features? You can connect to Wikipedia, look up words in a dictionary as you’re reading, get newspapers and magazines and listen to music. A drawback would be that the display is not color, but for reading books and newspapers that’s not a problem. Magazines and technical papers may be another issue.
I quicky browsed the Kindle book selection (Amazon says they have over 80,000 titles available) and saw books on MS Visual Studio, Jared Diamond’s “Collapse,” but not my favorite C++ book “On to C++” (I guess I really need to learn C#).
Anyway, this is a brand new product, so we’ll see how well it does. It’s so new that when I looked it up online this CNET review was about 38 minutes old! I have to say I’m curious how this latest ubicomp device does. At $400 it’s not too expensive, but as the CNET review points out, for that much, you can buy an ASUS PC – read more about that on Andras Fekete’s blog here.
Andrew Kun