Last month, I bought a Kindle.

Obviously, I did this only because somebody told me to. Specifically, my 
granddad asked me to buy one for him so he could give it to his wife for 
Christmas. They both seemed fascinated with the little gizmo, with her 
decreeing "John, don't you touch it. I don't want you to bugger it up!" 
(Yeah, she's like that...)

I've got to admit, the screen is pretty trippy. It's not like any kind 
of computer screen (mainly because it's reflective rather than 
emissive). To say that it "looks like paper" is a bit of a stretch. It 
also updates fairly slowly. The genius, though, is that it requires no 
power to hold an image (hence the long battery life).

In fact, the first time we turned it off, the screen turned into a 
beautiful illustration of some birds. If you really stare closely, you 
can vaguely make out the pixels. Or rather, I with my sharp binocular 
vision can just about resolve them. My grandparents with their barely 
functional eyes must surely be unable to see such things. (Let's face 
it, they can't see the on/off button.)

Unfortunately, now when we turn it off it just displays a boring picture 
of a famous author, selected at random. No amount of power cycles will 
make it display the beautiful bird image again, to my grandparents' 
utter despair.

It's also not especially easy to determine whether the device is 
actually switched on or off; the power light goes off a few seconds 
after you turn the device on. (I must say, it powers on /very/ fast 
indeed.) It seems that the only way to tell is that when turned off, the 
screen says "slide the power button to wake", which it never says while 
turned on.

As you'd expect, purchasing books for it from Amazon is... actually a 
total PITA! Which surprised me. For reasons beyond my comprehension, you 
*cannot* add Kindle books to your shopping basket. You can *only* 
purchase them immediately, right then and there. And for every single 
individual purchase, you have to go through a dozen order processing 
screens. You literally cannot browse the store, stick anything 
interesting into your basket, and when you're done, go through the 
basket, decide which ones you actually want to purchase, remove the 
rest, and then purchase the whole lot in one go. You can *only* purchase 
the books one at a time. And *only* way to hang on to several books is 
judicious use of tabbed browsing (a feature that nobody in my entire 
family except me has managed to figure out).

Presumably the purpose of this deliberate lack of functionality is to 
force you to buy more books than you would otherwise have bought. And 
sure, most of them are only a few quid. But it seems to be possible to 
spend money frighteningly quickly. Think about it: buy a small handful 


On the other hand, it's surprising (indeed, perplexing) how almost 
anything you do on the Amazon website somehow affects the Kindle 
/instantly/. I don't know how that's possible, but still. I registered 
the Kindle to the correct Amazon account, and within about 0.8 seconds 
the screen on the Kindle changed. That's almost faster than the page 
loading speed over my piffling 2 mbit Internet connection. (!)

Apparently it's supposed to be possible to make purchases from the 
Kindle itself. I haven't tried this. (God only knows how you repeatedly 
type in your credit card number on a device with keys significantly 
smaller than a human finger...)

It's certainly a nifty little toy. And it's /almost/ trivial enough to 
operate that my grandparents might actually figure it out eventually. 
Unfortunately, like all electronic devices, it has to scream "I can also 
do X! And Y! And Z! And J, L, R, F, Q and I!" just to confuse people. 
Actually reading a book with it is fairly self-explanatory.

(I love the way that to read the user manual you have to already know 
how to work the device. That's a wonderful bootstrapping problem.)

Now, if they made a device like this with Mathematica installed on it, 
I'd probably buy it. (It would be like the ultimate graphing 
calculator.) But as a device for reading books? Nah, I won't bother.

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