A few days ago I reviewed my Kindle 2, and now I want to offer up a short review on the Kindle 2 Leather Case offered by Amazon.  The case is not very bulky, and just barely larger than the dimensions of the Kindle.  It is a nice looking case, and is durable (so far).  With the Kindle 1 the case was free, now it is $30.

The Kindle 2 has built-in mount points for a case (or anything else for that matter) on the left edge of the device.  It should be noted that other companies are building cases that work with the Kindle 2.

The mount points are utilized by the Amazon Leather Case.  The bottom mount point is like a hook that rotates into the Kindle.

The second clip on the case is spring-loaded.  It slides up to click into the Kindle, then slides down to hold the Kindle firmly in the case.

The whole package feels like a book.  It is certainly lighter than a typical book, and holds more information!  The case holds the Kindle well.  I have full confidence when holding the case that the Kindle will stay in place.

As you can see, it is thin and very portable.

If you are going to buy a Kindle you better buy the case as well.  Sure its $30, but it is well worth it.  It was built for the Kindle and works well.  It seems to be built with quality.

As I have promised, here is my review of my Kindle 2.

Introduction

Last Christmas I got my wife a Kindle 1 for Christmas.  It is probably the best gift I ever got her in terms of her happiness.  I personally thought the thing was overpriced.  However, after her positive experiences with the device I started thinking I might enjoy one.  A few months later the Kindle 2 came out.  The thought crossed my mind that I might buy a Kindle for our trip to the UK last spring, but couldn’t bring myself to do it.  But my wife did think it was a good idea last month and graciously bought me one as a present for our trip to Maui.  I got to enjoy it for a couple of weeks before we left, and got a really good idea of how nice the little critter is on our trip.

Description and Photos

First, the Kindle 2 as it looks asleep (with screen saver up). On the left and right side are various control surfaces.  The display is electronic ink which means that it looks a lot like paper.  It isn’t back-lit, and it has a resolution like a book.  You have to look through a magnifying glass to see the pixels – much higher fidelity that your average computer monitor.  This means that spending hours with your Kindle won’t strain your eyes like hours with a computer.  At the bottom there is a small keyboard which can be used with the built in dictionary, for taking notes, and shopping the Kindle store.  You can also email and web browse, but I have not done so as it costs $$$$$, so I will not be reviewing those features.

First things first: sliding the spring loaded power button will take the Kindle in and out of sleep, and holding it in the tensioned position for about 10 seconds will turn the Kindle completely off.

The primary navigation starts with the right side of the kindle.  The Home button will take you to a listing of all of the books on the device.  You can navigate to consecutive pages of your home screen with the Next Page button (or consecutive pages of any document).

The home page displays the books and periodicals that have been downloaded to the Kindle.  Below each listing is an approximation of the size of the book in dots, with darker dots indicating how much has been read.

A 5 point device is used to navigate up, down, left, right and to select.  The Menu button will display a context sensitive menu and the Back button will return one to the previous context.  I’ll get to an example of this shortly.

On the left side of the Kindle is a second Next Page button that does the same function as the right Next Page button.  The Prev Button navigates to the previous page of a book, or listing.

Remember that context sensitive menu from before?  Here it is popped-up on the home screen.  Here I will click on the 5 way pointing device to select the Kindle store.

In the Kindle store you can select items to purchase.  If you are in Sprint coverage, the ebook or magazine will be downloaded for free.  You can also plug into a computer with the USB cable.  You may also email items to your kindle (it has an email address @kindle.com) such as an HTML, PDF, Word, or RTF document and Amazon will charge you 10 whole US cents to convert it to the Kindle format and send it to your device.

Back to what Kindle is best for: reading.

While reading I occasionally come across a word I don’t know.  I use the built-in dictionary to look it up.  Using the 5 point device, I simply navigate the cursor to the start of the word:

At the bottom of the screen the Kindle displays a quick definition:

When that isn’t enough, clicking enter will navigate to the main dictionary:

Clicking the Back button takes one back to the book where you left it.

Summary and Conclusions

The Kindle 2 costs $299 new from Amazon.com.  For that price one can pick up a decent netbook, or even a low end laptop.  So why buy a Kindle?  I can think of a few good reasons:

• You are passionate about reading.
• The Kindle has a far superior display to a computer, and is also superior to a book.
• Kindle books are often cheaper than the paper versions, especially new books that are only available in hard cover.  I read that at about book 80 the Kindle breaks even because of the discount.
• There are a lot of public domain books available for free around the internet.  Google books is a good source.  Getting these books on the Kindle is easy and dirt cheap.
• Many authors trying to make a name offer their books for cheap or free on the Kindle store.  There are some well-reviewed books in this category.
• You want to go on vacation and take a few books but don’t have the space?  The Kindle is tiny, weighs very little, and can pack literally hundreds of books.

My conclusion is this: I love my Kindle.  It ranks up there with the classic iPod as a terrific device and game changer in the market.

Edit:

A couple of other quick notes.  First, you can buy the Kindle here.  Also a couple of stats: this has a 6″ diagonal screen, compared to the Kindle DX with has a 9.7″ screen for $489.  I will also be posting a smaller second review to cover the optional case, and how the Kindle docks into it.

The people over at Gizmodo got their hands on some information regarding a new Microsoft device codename Courier.  It looks pretty good, but will it be too bulky to compete with the iPhone and other smart phones?  I don’t think it even has a phone built into it, and if people need to carry an electronic device around it is going to be their phone.

Several news source are reporting this morning that the ruling body of Wikipedia has banned the Church of Scientology IP blocks from editing Wikipedia.  Members of the organization were believed to have been constantly editing articles related to Scientology, removing any critical or negative information posted to articles, and posting biased information of their own.

While I usually disagree with censorship, I think this is a case of true abuse of Wikipedia by The Church of Scientology.  Scientologists have used an organized, aggressive attack on those that would criticize their organization.  This attack has occurred through personal intimidation, the courts, and through online attacks and editing by church members.  Banning Scientology editors from the site sends a clear signal to others that might maliciously edit on the site.

Other groups, including Catholics and the US Congress have attacked Wikipedia in the courts or through biased and malicious editing because they didn’t agree with the content of the site.  The US Congress’s IP range was actually temporarily blocked by Wikipedia to stop a string of biased edits.  I am happy to hear that the leadership took this stance to continue to crack down on these types of people.  Wikipedia is a great resource.  Never in the history of humankind as so much knowledge been agregated in one place for public consumption.  I think that resource needs to be protected from those that would harm it for personal gain.

I downloaded the newly-released Google Chrome 2.0.  It still sucks but not nearly as bad as it did.  I won’t be switching away from Firefox as my everyday browser anytime soon, but Chrome is getting there.  Here are a few of the let downs:

• Full-screen mode: In Firefox I just move my mouse to the top of the screen to get at the address bar and other commands.  There is no way to navigate or do any other tasks with your mouse while in full-screen in Chrome.
• Lack of extensions.  I guess this was in the betas but didn’t make it to GA.  The ability to quickly and easily create extensions is one of Firefox’s best assets.
• Plugin ecosystem is small.  Much more difficult to write a plugin that an extension.
• A little clunky.  Google has tried to do their own thing a little too much here.  The browser feels foreign even after a couple of hours of use.  If that is the case for a technophile like myself, it will certainly be the case for Joe and Jane Average User.

Here are a few positives:

• Large screen real-estate dedicated to page.
• Silverlight and Flash both seem to work out of the box.
• Fast Javascript.  But not that much faster that Firefox, and not for long.

I am one of those that believes that Google would be better served improving the Firefox code-base (to which they still donate people & money) than building chrome.  Hell, they could even put the chrome UI on top of the Firefox functionality.  Now that would be a nice web browser.  Still, if they build a better browser then I may switch.  Only time will tell.

Despite it’s size, the Smart ForTwo is one of the safest cars on the road.  With the help of Tesla Motors, they announced an electric version last year and look to be on schedule.  Here is a photos set and a video of the new Electric Smart ForTwo.

The regular Smart FourTwo starts under $12k.  If they sell the electric for under $15k I think they will have a long waiting list.  Electricity is much cheaper than gasoline.  A 100 mile range is plenty for commuting.  Of course this might not get around very well in snow and ice.  Its light enough and low enough that it would probably get stuck.  But for sunny metropolitan areas, this should be ideal.

I find it humorous that the database company with a database that is outperformed by Microsoft SQL Server is buying the software company with a software environment (Java) that is outperformed by Microsoft .Net.  These guys are going to be the K-Mart to Microsoft’s Wal-Mart.  And yes, I have worked with Oracle DB and SQL Server, Java and .Net.

Oracle Buys Sun.

I allow comments on my site, but the commenter must be a registered user, and I approve all comments.  Anyone can self-register.  I use these setting in the blog software on my site, WordPress, to keep spammers from posting messages to my site.

A few weeks ago I started seeing new users registering, but not leaving comments.  There isn’t much of a reason to register as a user other than to comment.  Still, I see really weird usernames all associated with free email providers.  I have started waiting a few days to see if the user comments, and if not, I delete them.   But I am not seeing any spam comments.

I am not quite sure what the game is here.  Perhaps the spam software is probing for vulnerabilities, or checking to see if any user can author articles?  It is just a slight annoyance as it really doesn’t take much to delete some users, and I can always turn off comments since they really aren’t used very much.

Not sure, but this behavior has given some insight into the evil hearts of spammers.