Musings of a Marketing Maven

If the iPad is a BMW, Amazon’s new Kin­dle Touch is a Chevy or a bare-bones Ford. It will take you where you want to go, but don’t expect frills along the way…

I chose the $99 entry-level touch screen model, with WiFi but no 3G. It dis­plays adver­tis­ing con­stantly, except when you’re actively read­ing or inter­act­ing with the device. For­tu­nately, the ads don’t intrude when you’re reading.

The device seems a bit slow, espe­cially when respond­ing to touch for menu selec­tion, page turns, etc. Per­haps the hard­ware is a wee bit underpowered?

WiFi is a bit fee­ble, even when sit­ting in an office just a few strides away from the WiFi router with a strong signal.

Text dis­play is crisp, but can be uneven. (My opin­ion about the Touch’s read­abil­ity has improved some­what after a week of usage.)

The ads them­selves are not intru­sive; how­ever, nav­i­gat­ing away from a full-page ad to what­ever you want to read is a bit clunky.

One of the most plea­sur­able aspects of the Kin­dle Touch is how it feels in your hand: light­weight, nicely bal­anced, with a suede-like fin­ish on the back. Friendly and approach­able in its feel.

No Romance

Out-of-the-Box Expe­ri­ence

Com­pared to the expe­ri­ence of unveil­ing a new Apple prod­uct, there’s no magic (except for my cat, who adores all Ama­zon boxes, no mat­ter what their contents).

Kindle’s pack­ag­ing is plain and mono­chro­matic: no-nonsense card­board encases the device, a plas­tic film pro­tects the screen.

Inside there’s no friendly mar­ket­ing col­lat­eral to wel­come the new Kin­dle owner. Amazon’s Thank You Let­ter will down­load when you sync your Kin­dle. (Four hours later my wel­come let­ter has not yet downloaded.)

When I pow­ered up the Kin­dle, I was sur­prised to note there’s no “wel­come screen,” just a user tip on how to turn pages. (A missed brand­ing oppor­tu­nity on Amazon’s part…)

Unlike Apple Ama­zon makes no attempt to “romance the brand.” It appears that Ama­zon wants to posi­tion Kin­dle as a util­i­tar­ian prod­uct, focus­ing on its con­crete func­tional ben­e­fits and prac­ti­cal uses. It’s a curi­ous posi­tion­ing strat­egy, espe­cially if they’re aim­ing Kin­dle at book lovers, peo­ple who like me love the expe­ri­ence of read­ing, and are will­ing to invest in build­ing a Kin­dle com­pat­i­ble library.

Some­what Con­fus­ing Usabil­ity Model

Touch or Tap to Use

If you’ve used an iPhone or an iPad, you may find the UI a bit con­fus­ing. On the Kin­dle Touch, you touch an item to select it (you point to it and hold your fin­ger there long enough until it high­lights). The response time is a tad sluggish.

You touch any­where in the left-hand area of the screen to go back a page; you touch the mid­dle of the screen or to the right to advance a page. This is intended as a con­ve­nience for one-handed read­ers. (Over time I’ve dis­cov­ered the swip­ing hor­i­zon­tally, to left or right, can flip pages, but on my device it doesn’t always work reliably.)

Swip­ing on the Kin­dle Touch is not as uni­ver­sally use­ful as on an iPad. I don’t think there’s a rich “ges­ture lan­guage” for the Touch. It seems that the swipe ges­ture is only par­tially func­tional; when dis­play­ing lists, you can swipe ver­ti­cally to scroll the book list up or down. When read­ing you can swipe to change pages.

Dis­play­ing Col­lec­tions: Text-Centric Approach

On an iPad, the Kin­dle app dis­plays images of the book cov­ers as shown here:

The Kin­dle Touch takes a less visual approach when dis­play­ing col­lec­tions; it sim­ply lists books by their title or author’s name — a missed oppor­tu­nity for finesse.

I had expected this lat­est Kin­dle gen­er­a­tion to be more visual in its UI. Sadly, most of the visu­als are reserved for the spon­sors’ ads, or illus­tra­tions within books or magazines.

Kin­dle Touch: Bet­ter for Reading

Although the iPad dis­plays col­lec­tions in a more visu­ally pleas­ing man­ner, the Kin­dle Touch is bet­ter suited — that is, eas­ier on the eyes — for long-term read­ing. This new Kin­dle is also smaller, lighter, and takes less effort to hold. All-in-all bet­ter for immer­sive, multi-hour reading.

I just wish the Ama­zon device had a bet­ter UI. Based on a cou­ple of hours’ use, the design lan­guage seems incon­sis­tent, hard to pre­dict (espe­cially the home but­ton). As a result it’s going to take longer to learn than expected.

Con­fus­ing Home Button

On a Kin­dle Touch the home but­ton is a set of 4 par­al­lel lines at the bot­tom of the device. If you’ve learned “home but­ton behav­iors” on an IOS device (iPad, iPhone, etc.), expect to be con­fused. The Kindle’s home but­ton is under utilized.

When the device is in screen­saver mode — dis­play­ing full-screen ads — you might expect that press­ing the home but­ton will take you to your home screen, or resume read­ing where you’d left off. But in this case press­ing home has no effect. Instead you must press the on/off switch to switch from the full-screen ad to resume read­ing. I find this confusing.

E-Ink — Text Display

Bet­ter, But Not Perfect

Given specs of 167 ppi and 16 shades of grey, I had expected read­ing leg­i­bil­ity to approach that of black-and-white newsprint — or a clas­sic news­pa­per. Yes, there’s higher con­trast and improved leg­i­bil­ity com­pared to the Kin­dle DX I tried a year ago, but the dis­play still disappoints.

On text-dense pages, lines dis­play unevenly, even when it’s obvi­ous that the char­ac­ters should be ren­dered iden­ti­cally. This is dis­tract­ing, because it draws atten­tion away from the delight­fully immer­sive expe­ri­ence of flow when reading.

The uneven dis­play appears to be caused by the way E-Ink ren­ders text on screen: some­times using dif­fer­ent shades of grey or dif­fer­ent thick­nesses when ren­der­ing char­ac­ter shapes. (An incon­sis­tent use of pix­els for ren­der­ing char­ac­ter glyphs.)

I’m not sure if this is an issue with this par­tic­u­lar device, or a lim­i­ta­tion with this gen­er­a­tion of E-Ink on Kindles.

This bugs me, because I was ready to ignore the lack of typo­graphic diver­sity, in exchange for highly leg­i­ble text that does a few things superbly well.

Fixed Ori­en­ta­tion

Unlike the Kin­dle app on iPad, you can­not change the display’s ori­en­ta­tion from por­trait to land­scape mode and have text reflow. Kin­dle Touch offers por­trait mode only.