Russell Beattie

My coworker Brett brought in his Kindle 2 to flaunt and after fondling it for a while, I have to say it's truly a killer upgrade to the original. It's just a really, really nice little gadget, no? It looked nice in pics, it's even nicer in person.

I do have to say that I think the electronic ink stuff is a bit overrated. I'd be just as happy, or even more happy, if there was an LED screen there instead even if I had to recharge it daily to use. Combined with a decent web-browser, it'd be a killer device in this form factor. (The web browser is still passable... and though I understand that Amazon has to make money somehow, charging for RSS feeds is ridiculous!)

Even though I think the Author's Guild is wrong about the text-to-speech stuff, I now understand where they are coming from. The voice quality is pretty great, and testing it just now I could totally see me listening to it rather than a book-on-tape or whatever. It's way better than the WarGames/Steven Hawking voice that I imagined.

That's it for my mini review... I may have to break out the credit card again as it's definitely really nice. It'd be soooo great for my kid to practice reading on.

-Russ