I got to play with a Kindle

I was sitting on the plane last weekend when the late 30-something woman to my left opened her purse, took out a Moleskine notebook, and opened it. I instantly pegged her as an English nerd. I didn't realize how right I'd be; it wasn't a Moleskine, it was a Kindle.

I blurted, "So howww do you like it!?".

"I love it!", she said. "Would you like to check it out?"

"Yes, yes I would."

She gave me the walkthrough, beginning with her list of books, one of which was some sex counseling thing -- little awkward.

After a minute of Kindle network connection troubles, she let me buy Friday's New York Times, which took seconds to download. All the while, she gave me Amazon's party line on battery life, usability, etc. I never thought to ask her if she worked for Amazon, though I did confess to working for a publisher.

I flipped through some pages, noting the reassuring heft of this machine. The screen clarity really is amazon, er, amazing. I found the refresh rate to be a little slow. The screen going black as it refreshes unsuspended my disbelief, and I can see this being a problem for the ebook reading experience. Perhaps one gets used to it as we're all used to flipping pages.

I held the Kindle with both hands, one on either side. I asked her if she accidentally flipped pages.

She admitted to such frequent unintentional page turns that she used the Kindle's "placemark" feature about every five pages just to avoid...something. I'm not sure what, though. Maybe you can fast-forward a Kindle? Either way, it sounds as if the page turn bars could use more than a little fine tuning.

The scroll bar, just right of the right thumb in this photo, needs work as well. The scroll bar is the main navigation device when the Kindle is not in a book. In other words, you choose what book to read, what chapter to open, what newspaper to purchase, etc. using the scroll bar, which you thumb up or down. To make a selection, you press down onto the scroll bar. Many times during my 15 minutes with this Kindle, I accidentally scrolled when I meant to select.

An exacerbating flaw is the slow processor speed. Pages "turn" with reasonable speed, but to do anything other than turn a page -- to navigate between books or to browse the Amazon Kindle store -- the page takes more time to load. So with every click of the scroll bar, I had to wait to see if I'd clicked or scrolled. If I'd accidentally scrolled-then-clicked, I had to navigate back to where I was and try again. The speed is definitely not as quick as, say, browsing the web on a computer. I found it a little tedious.

So hopefully Amazon will eliminate these flaws in the Kindle 2, which seems to be imminent.