Scoble doesn’t like the Kindle much. If by “not much” we mean “everyone associated with the project should be fired.” He’s got an advantage on me - he’s used one for a week, which is exactly a week longer than I’ve used one. But I still say his criticisms are (largely) bogus.
Scoble: No ability to buy paper goods from Amazon through Kindle.
Me: Robert gets off to an OK start here; it’s odd that you can’t use an Amazon product to buy other Amazon products. But is the Kindle an all-purpose internet device or an e-book reader with internet functionality designed to complement e-book consumption? It seems that Kindle’s mobile broadband and web access is really intended to get content from the interwebs onto the device so you can read it. Everything else is secondary (but it’s still an odd choice on Bezos’ part).
Scoble: Usability sucks. They didn’t think about how people would hold this device.
Me: Fair enough if true. Ergonomics are important, and others have complained about button placement. It does seem ergonomically superior to the Sony reader and much smaller repurposed devices (PDA, iPhone, etc.). An e-book needs to be roughly the proportions of an actual book, in my opinion. There’s a reason books are shaped like they are.
Scoble: UI sucks. Menus? Did they hire some out-of-work Microsoft employees?
Me: Robert is starting to go off the tracks here. This is a variation on his later beef about touch screens. Not everything is an iPhone. Not everything should be. Sure, a UI based on big icons and a touch screen would be great, but for 90% of the time you’re using the device, you don’t need to touch the screen (it’s an e-book reader, remember?). The primary requirements for the display are (a) that it is easy to read, which means black text on a white background and (b) it doesn’t drain the battery in two hours.
Scoble: No ability to send electronic goods to anyone else. I know Mike Arrington has one. I wanted to send him a gift through this of Alan Greenspan’s new book. I couldn’t. That’s lame. No social network. Why don’t I have a list of all my friends who also have Kindles and let them see what I’m reading?
Me: These are actually two different complaints, but they come from the same place. Just like everything need not be an iPhone, not every service should be Facebook. This mad rush to create social networks around everything diminishes both the social network and the service. There’s plenty of other avenues to share your reading list with your friends, and Amazon rightly chose to concentrate on the core functionality of the Kindle instead of the latest Web 2.0 faddishness. It’s a far more significant accomplishment that you can download e-books into your library wirelessly than it would be to create a Kindle social network that most people wouldn’t use anyway.
Scoble: No touch screen. The iPhone has taught everyone that I’ve shown this to that screens are meant to be touched. Yet we’re stuck with a silly navigation system because the screen isn’t touchable.
Me: Wrong, wrong, wrong. Touchscreens are a good idea for some devices, but a bad idea for others. In some cases, adding a touchscreen would make the device harder to use (imagine replacing the TV remote with a touchscreen). In this case, adding a touchscreen would require compromises in other areas. It would make the device significantly more expensive. It’s already too expensive at $399. It would decrease battery life, as the reason the battery lasts so long is that e-ink only draws power when the display changes (ask Steve Jobs about design compromises driven by lengthening time between recharges). Finally, the screen on the Kindle is designed primarily for displaying text. Everything else is secondary, and for now at least, there’s no such thing as an e-ink touchscreen. And for an e-book, e-ink and menus trumps touch.
The Kindle is clearly an imperfect device, that is incrementally better than what came before it. The technology still isn’t there to make it good enough to replace paper for me, and the economics of the Kindle Marketplace are still off. So there’s a lot to criticize. That it isn’t an iPhone/Facebook/browser that happens to also display text isn’t where to start, however.
We now know what will make Robert Scoble cry - the immensity of the universe and our tiny little place in it, as visualized by Microsoft Research’s Worldwide Telescope. MS describes WWT as “a rich visualization environment that functions as a virtual telescope, bringing together imagery from the best ground- and space telescopes to enable seamless, guided explorations of the universe.” That is, perhaps, the world’s most boring description of a service that is incredibly amazing. Even an astrophysicist gets a little giddy talking about it:
