[djgreedo]

Originally Posted by ApK

djgreedo,

Amazon has made three successful generations of Kindles with no touch and physical keyboards. This should tell you something about what their customers want.

And paper lasted thousands of years.

I'm sure Amazon would take care with a touch UI, as I'm sure Sony and B&N took care, yet I frequently miss when trying to look up words on my Sony and we saw a new Nook STR video here where the rep doing the demo failed to get swipe to work half the time.

Nothing you say here indicates that touch is worse than non-touch. Implementation makes a big difference, and a bad implementation of touch does not prove that all touch control is doomed.

You don't need to click 9 times to get to the bottom of a Kindle screen list. Press down and hold. One motion, 2 seconds, no fingerprints.

Still a lot more work than reaching up and touching the item you want. e-ink doesn't have much of a problem with fingerprints.

I'm sure touch would make some stuff better. I'd like the option for many things, but for basic reading related navigation, the Kindle simply isn't as tedious or inefficient as you make it out.

My measure of tedious is if I avoid doing things because they require too much effort vs payoff then it's tedious. For example writing long emails on my phone: too much work to type out full sentences and edit and correct typos, so I don't do it. The same goes for writing notes on my Kindle, reading footnotes, looking up words, etc. Remove the barrier of effort to do these things and they become intuitive and easy. At present I need to really need to read a footnote or look up a definition to go through the several clicks to do it. With a touch interface it is one action. Those extra clicks are a needless distraction from reading.

This is precisely why the iPhone made smartphones popular with the general public a couple of years ago - although smartphones before the iPhone were more capable, the iPhone made it easy for more users to easily get to those functions they didn't know were there or didn't know how to get to them.

Internet browsing and PDF reading on the Kindle are atrocious experiences. With touch they could be vastly improved to the point where many people would start to take advantage.

In many situations, owning both it and a touch reader myself, I can see how I'd still prefer it. I can totally get YOU and others not liking it's nav methods, but Kindle's success, the poll results here, and the owners comments are all testament to the fact that many of us do.

The popularity of the Kindle doesn't mean it can't be improved. Touch was not practical until recently for an e-ink screen (I had an old Sony with resistive touch and it was horrendous, though still better than no touch). The price of a Kindle has dropped dramatically to the point where touch is practical and the readability is not compromised.

The 'if it ain't broke don't fix it' approach is one I can't stand when it comes to technology. There are better ways of doing some things on a reader, and most of those better ways are through touch.

Apple iDevices have more than one button. They have one on the front, several more on the sides. Only rarely used for nav related stuff as I understand, usually sleep and volume.

So similar to Android and Windows Phone/Windows Mobile then. I will add that I find most touch devices (tablets and phones, including my MP3 player) could be vastly improved by adding a few more physical buttons, but I also understand that the general public wants new and shiny things, not perfectly designed things. Today's 'new and shiny' is touch, and you can thank Apple for making 'shiny' a priority over 'functional and well designed'. Unfortunately tech demand is now driven by the masses, not by the early adopters and people who care about getting the best functionality and experience.

Lastly, is your screen name said like "didgeridoo" like the musical instrument, or "DJ Greedo" like the green guy from Star Wars spinning records? Or....?

Like my first two initials (DJ) + the guy from Star Wars who shot first.

p.s. My enthusiasm for the Kindle is only SLIGHTLY diminished by the fact that after typing this whole thing on the freaking little keyboard, the browser just crashed on me and I had to come up to my desktop PC to rewrite it. GRR!

The Kindle really is great at what it does 95% of the time - display a page of text in a beautiful, readable way. But as soon as I want to do something other than read from page to page I find it frustratingly limited.

I believe Bezos's approach is to keep the display quality the main priority, so I think that any changes to the Kindle (whether touch or colour, etc.) will not adversely affect the Kindle's main feature.