Quote:
Originally Posted by perkata
I bought the Kindle DX despite knowing of its absolutely ludicrous design faults: (1) miserable keyboard; (2) lack of unicode support (in a machine supposed to appeal to the college market?); (3) unfathomable lack of support for folders in the file system; lack of what I regard as sufficient storage (my library of English-language publications is about 50GB, of Chinese about 310GB); lack of external storage other than my laptops or desktops.
The Kindle is fine if all you do is read English language books and don't have so many that you have to organize them to locate a particular title easily
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The Kindle 2 / DX are mass consumer items, not specialty contraptions for folks with a half terabyte of e-books.
The Kindle folks may bring out a college-centric edition with full unicode support. That's a software update. There's also ver 2.5 or 3 to look forward to.
And, taking your first (and one supposes therefore you most important) point, the "miserable" keyboard is the way it is to keep manufacturing costs down but deliver "good enough" access when keyboard input is required. It is there to facilitate buying stuff in the store, doing rudimentary searches within books or wikipedia, and very basic "note taking".
I can well see Kindle bringing out a mid-range hybrid which has more bells and whistles designed for the college crowd ... but it will be competing for netbooks and laptops which almost everyone will already have. Just as the iPad is not designed primarily to replace e-readers like the Kindle, the Kindle is not designed primarily to replace a full portable computer experience. That also explains the lower price, etc.
But we agree:
the Kindle is fine if all you do is read English language books and as it evolves into future editions no doubt it will well embrace the same functionality in other languages and character sets.