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Voyage to Nowhere: The Amazon Kindle Story

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Re: Voyage to Nowhere: The Amazon Kindle Story

#41

Post by nandhp »

MBCook wrote: post #11
sliverstorm wrote: post #7

To replicate the experience of the Kindle Voyage ‘button’ find an immovable surface in your house: a marble kitchen countertop will do. Place your thumb upon the surface, then press down – deforming your thumb. Not pleasant, is it? I don't follow. It feels like I'm pressing down on something. Of all the things I can think of that would cause an RSI, pinching a pressure-sensitive button seems low on the list. I also d…

I own a voyage, but can't come up with the answer to one simple question. In what way are those stupid little touch strips actually BETTER than real buttons? Since there's no actual physical feedback you can't tell how hard you have to press. They've tried to fix this by letting you set sensitivity levels, but that doesn't work great. Then I thought it would be a good idea to add a pager motor to fake physical feedba…

> In what way are those stupid little touch strips actually BETTER than real buttons?

Well, they probably don't wear out. I know someone who replaced their Kindle Keyboard because the next page button wore out after four years. (They love their Paperwhite, both for the touch screen and the front-lighting.)

Re: Voyage to Nowhere: The Amazon Kindle Story

#42

Post by epochwolf »

bduerst wrote: post #33
jayvanguard wrote: post #23

This person seems extremely picky. I have pretty much every generation of kindle and they just keep getting incrementally better. Resolution, backlight, multiple dictionaries, x-ray, etc.

Yeah, it reads like no matter what would be done, this person would find something wrong with the product experience. I use a paperwhite and read to fall asleep. The white-tinted light isn't as much of an issue as people or f.lux make it out to be. If the paperwite were tinted, this person would probably be complaining that it makes them fall asleep rather than stay alert while reading.

I'm willing to give the author a pass on the white-light issue since it is a legitimate problem for some people. But I don't expect amazon to ever address that problem.

There's always a group of people that can't use a given product because they have one issue or another. For example, the Kindle Voyage isn't accessible for a blind person.

Re: Voyage to Nowhere: The Amazon Kindle Story

#43

Post by megablast »

jayvanguard wrote: post #23

This person seems extremely picky. I have pretty much every generation of kindle and they just keep getting incrementally better. Resolution, backlight, multiple dictionaries, x-ray, etc.

> This person seems extremely picky.

I don't understand this? Why not disagree with the valid points he made, rather than just calling him picky? When you use a device a lot, as you would an ereader, I can imagine these problems becoming magnified.

Re: Voyage to Nowhere: The Amazon Kindle Story

#45

Post by TheDong »

teleological wrote: post #26

Amazon, please hire this person and pay them whatever they ask.

As this user states, these issues are easily googleable and well known already.

They could read the amazon reviews page for the kindle to learn these specific gripes.

What they need is not someone now who sees the problems with the product (believe me, they know the problems), but someone who sees all these problems as it's being created and people who are able to produce reliable code that fixes it now.

The cow has left the barn on the point where this person would have been most useful.

Re: Voyage to Nowhere: The Amazon Kindle Story

#46

Post by thaumasiotes »

moe wrote: post #38
Johnythree wrote: post #8

Totally agree with this article, but I'm surprised he doesn't mention the train wreck of the touch screen on the Paperwhite. For a start it's incredibly flaky. Sometimes the slightest accidental touch will cause it to jump randomly to somewhere in the book. Other times I can press it hard or rub furiously and still nothing happens. Then sometimes it will pause for a few seconds, then do something incomprehensible. If…

I think you might have a defective unit, the touchscreen on my Paperwhite works reliably. That said, even when it works perfectly it remains inferior to the simple shoulder buttons that the older kindles had. I hope Amazon brings them back on the next Kindle. And those "touchstrips" on the Voyage are indeed infuriating. If anyone is in the market for a kindle then by all means save your money and stick with the Paper…

I have an older kindle with shoulder buttons and a keyboard. That interface would be vastly superior to a touchscreen except that Amazon unaccountably left the numbers off of the keyboard. Far and away the most common use I have for the keyboard is jumping to a particular location, which calls for me to input numbers.

The Paperwhites I got for my brother and sister use much more convenient number input (touchscreen) and have much nicer cases. I prefer my grey screen to their white, though.

If Amazon just released a kindle with the same four shoulder buttons, the same screen, a lighter-weight case, and number buttons so I don't have to navigate an on-screen symbol display with a hard-to-use D-pad, I'd be thrilled. The buttons don't need to be reimagined. I don't get why they left.

Re: Voyage to Nowhere: The Amazon Kindle Story

#47

Post by jccalhoun »

He mentions lack of including any allegedly dyslexic-friendly font as one strike against Kindles. I thought that there wasn't actually a lot of evidence those work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyslexie

I hate justified margins though so that's reason enough not to be happy with Kindles.

Re: Voyage to Nowhere: The Amazon Kindle Story

#49

Post by jwatte »

jayvanguard wrote: post #23

This person seems extremely picky. I have pretty much every generation of kindle and they just keep getting incrementally better. Resolution, backlight, multiple dictionaries, x-ray, etc.

Maybe it's personal, but I, too, hate the full justification. US newspapers used to do a lot of that, too, whereas European one didn't. It is shown that full justification is detrimental to actual reading.

That being said, I don't understand why he involve the Echo. First, it's a totally depend product, and second, it's the most used internet radio and music payer I've owned.

Re: Voyage to Nowhere: The Amazon Kindle Story

#50

Post by delecti »

jacobolus wrote: post #17
nether wrote: post #3

I really pity the author. He's lost the ability to enjoy a book and throws a fit when typesetting is flawed. A sure path to disappointment and unhappiness is to demand only "the best" in everything. He should just learn to read his books as they are.

Wait, what? Shitty typography makes a book substantially harder to read. With good typography, the color of text blocks is even and flowing, and logical structure of headings, captions, block quotations, etc. is obvious and clear without calling attention to itself. With shitty typography, the eye is constantly pulled away from a regular flow by the uneven color within text blocks or by distracting elements on the pa…

If I had to guess, the parent commenter hasn't experienced bad typography on a kindle. Typography is very much one of those things that you only notice when it's poor, or if you're really deep into it.

I'm certainly not, and I've never given two thoughts about typography except when weird things happen with it.

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