Yes, that is an actual word. 
A combination of the AUD nearing parity with the American Dollar and the low price finally made me bite the bullet and order a Kindle 3 with a lighted cover.I A mere four days later I had my hands on my first real eBook reader.II
There’s already more than enough unboxing photos, videos and reviews of the Kindle so I thought instead I’d take a few photos of the dead-tree killer with a microscopeIII so anybody curious could get a better look of it (and the official Amazon cover) much closer than they see with their own eyes.
Note: The following images lead you to larger versions on Flickr
For anybody interested in removing the Amazon logo,IV it seems to me to be the type of printing that you can remove with sugar.
If you couldn’t already tell, I decided on the burnt orange cover. At the last minute I decided on the light and am surprised at just how often I rely on it. It’s not the cheapest cover by any means but it’s certainly the most functional and minimal cover you can buy.
Also I thought I ought to provide a quick followup to my previous venture into eReaders, covered in The Pico-Life W960 and How I Almost Owned One, specifically comparing the two:
The Kindle tackles almost every shortcoming of the W960, including; Two dictionaries with easy lookup, both proper English and American. Full WiFi functionality with WPA2 support. A matte black finish that doesn’t attract fingerprints. Simple navigation with no accidental button presses. A range of covers that protect the device, as well as third party covers. Multiple fonts with scaled sizing and spacing.
The single best difference between the two is a real UI crafted especially for reading. Awake the Kindle and you’re greeted not with the base menu with a list of choices – just the last page you read. Simple things like that make it almost incomparably good for reading.
The only downside I can see is the always lamented lack of ePub support, which is easily solved by using the simple and powerful CalibreV to convert and upload any ePub books you have. Calibre will even send books to your Kindle email address if you don’t want to drop them onto the device via USB.
I’m happy to have returned the W960 and happier yet to be reading on the Kindle, I’m already devouring books faster than I ever have.
- I didn’t see the point of paying an extra $50 for 3G and opted for the cheaper WiFi only model. [↩]
- Which has to be the single best postage time from USA > Oz I’ve ever experienced. [↩]
- Not a real microscope mind you; a cheap glorified webcam 2MP USB gadget that mimics a microscope, and takes photos that are more detailed than our eyes can see. [↩]
- It doesn’t bug me enough to worry about, some people have complained on forums about it’s “intrusiveness”. [↩]
- Which is open source too, so there’s no excuse! [↩]
