For Christmas this year, I received a Kindle Touch. Ok, the truth is, while I would have liked to have received it, I didn’t, so I bought it for myself. Doing so has the advantage of being certain that I’ll get just what I want. But before purchasing, I needed to make a few decisions—the chief of which was choosing which one to buy. There is the Kindle, the Kindle Touch and the Kindle Fire. I took the time to demo all three along with the similar Barns & Noble Nook products. Truth be told, I felt that the B&N products had better interfaces and were, overall, nicer in hand but I had received an Amazon gift card so I was somewhat restricted.

The Fire was a nice tablet overall but it felt heavy in hand—like a plastic-coated brick. After handling it for a few minutes I couldn’t wait to put it down which is not the kind of user experience I was hoping for. The basic Kindle, on the other hand, was very light and while the screen was only black and white, it would suffice for the kind of reading I wanted to use it for. The E-ink screen would remain charged for long periods of time so I don’t need to plug it into the wall every night to recharge like every other gadget I own. But the Kindle is severely hobbled by the lack of a keyboard. To enter any text, an on-screen keyboard appears and I would need to toggle the button below the screen to select each character one at a time.

Nope. Not gonna happen. I understand the business model of doing this—it makes going outside of the Amazon store almost impossible and so the user is more inclined to stay fixed within the Amazon ecosystem but I would not be happy with this limitation. Read the rest of this entry »