Category: Reviews

Kindle!

When Dave asked me what I’d like for my birthday this year, I immediately responded: “A Kindle!”

I’d been working on some new projects and amassed a bundle of chunky text books as part of my research. Every time we left the house, I was bringing the lot with me – just in case there was some down time while we were out. The idea of having all my texts and annotations in a single 241g bundle was vastly appealing.

Note for Irish readers: the Kindle is not available for sale to Ireland via amazon.co.uk – we’re supposed to order from amazon.com, then buy the UK power adapter as an extra, and pay international shipping and duty on the lot. If you are blessed, as Dave is, with an obliging UK-based friend or relative, use their address for shipping!

eInk

When the goods arrived, I broke into the packaging, hauled out the goods, and started trying to peel the “How to get started” sticker off the screen. Doh! That weren’t no sticker – that was eInk – yowza! Impressive! Text is as legible as normal print in all levels of light, though the screen is shades of grey on grey, rather than crisp black on white, which takes a small bit of getting used to.

Content

You can download free and paid Kindle-specific content from amazon (again, Irish users are directed to the .com site where the selection is restricted for international customers). You can usually (always?) download the first chapter free to see if you fancy spending your hard earned cash on the full book. You can also drag-and-drop content in a variety of supported formats to the device.

I got the WiFi only version, but with 3G, this toy would have been an amazing thing to have back in my pre-kiddie days when I travelled a bit and always wound up for English reading material just before the end of my trip, having lugged around several kilos of paper for the duration. It has a web browser too, so you can catch up on news and blogs if you’re not in the mood for a whole novel.

Readability

Content that can re-flow on the 6″ screen is very easy to read and enjoy – PDFs somewhat less so: original page size, fonts, layout, whitespace etc. are preserved, which means you may have to zoom in to get to a legible font size, and then scan left and right, and up and down on every page. Since battery power on the Kindle is used up by screen re-draws, this is a pretty unpleasant and inefficient way to read. You can email a PDF to your personal Kindle address with a subject line of “Convert” and amazon will convert it and make it availble for download to the device. Good for documents that don’t rely on their layout to make sense (no use for reading tables of statistics). If you’re going to avail of the conversion service, add yourself to your safe senders list first on the “Manage Your Kindle” page on amazon first!

There’s also an experimental text to speech facility, which seemed pretty nifty. The voices didn’t sound too computer-y at all, though I can’t imagine them reading a whole entire book to me – I think I’d opt for content from audible or similar if I was after that kind of service.

Syncing

Syncing your latest position in a text across multiple platforms is great – I can pick up where I left off on the Kindle, the iPhone, my laptop or the iPad. This only works for content downloaded from the Kindle store, as far as I can tell thus far, though.

And there’s more…

It’s taken me weeks to get as far as posting this introductory review, because every time I try to be definitive about something the Kindle does/doesn’t do, I find myself discovering new features and services and wasting time trying them out. So, I’m going to go ahead and post the brief details above: if I discover any particular useful features worthy of mention, they’ll get a separate post another time.

In short:

Would I recommend it? Yes. Buy a cover while you’re at it – mine arrived this morning and I’m no longer afraid to stick it in my handbag for fear of the screen getting scratched.

iPad Review

This Summer I developed an App for iThings, so got my hands on an iPad for legitimate business purposes. They’re a bit pricey to be justified as a personal toy as yet. My team and I are using the iPad to research the device’s capabilities, check out other apps, and test/demo our own apps, but the member of the team who gets the most use and value out of it is my 4 year old son.

As with any toy that rewards the user’s efforts, the iPad is encouraging an interest in spelling, typing, sums and other reasoning (e.g. predicting trajectories in Angry Birds) that parental efforts in the real world have up to now failed to inspire.

And there are a phenomenal number of iPhone and iPad apps aimed at his age group – both to entertain and to educate: annimated nursery rhymes, characters that echo back what’s said to them in cutesy voices, first spelling and maths games… the list goes on. I may review some specific apps here at some stage, but not just now.

The iPad is definitely the ultimate first computer for kids, and once the price point drops to ~€100, every pre-schooler in Ireland will have one (or one to share, at least).

Top tip: if you are letting a small person play with your iThing, log out of the store first, and preferably turn off whatever internet access you’ve got going. My boy’s excuse for clicking on Upgrade and other links is that he can’t read them yet, but I’m guessing that even when he can, the temptation to add to the games selection will prove too much to resist.

For the grown ups, there’s plenty to entertain and educate too. I’ve downloaded an app to learn how to play real Mahjong, and have been doing Sudokus again for the first time in ~4 years. (It’s almost as if something happened 4 years ago that made me give up all my hobbies for lack of time and energy… I wonder what that could have been? Hmmm…)I’ve also been looking at word processors and spreadsheets, timetablers and mind-mapping tools. Oh – and the book-reading apps, of course: iBooks, Kindle and the like.

Reading books on the iPad is just lovely, provided you’re indoors and shaded. Tragically it’s quite useless in bright/direct light, like the iPod and iPhone before it. For these conditions, you’ll be wanting a Kindle or similar.

iPod apps run on the iPad at their original resolution or supersized to fit the larger screen (by clicking the x2 icon), and many apps either have versions specifically designed to make the most of the greater area of screen real estate, or are developed for iPad only. The larger screen size is a definite bonus, and the onscreen keyboard is as manageable and responsive as the “full size” keyboards on netbooks and other similarly-sized devices.

In short:

Would I recommend the iPad? Oh yes

At that price? Oh no! Wait a generation or two, then either pick up an early one on sale, or the latest and greatest at a price point that’s *got* to be lower than today’s. It’s a must have, but not right away.