Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Amazon Kindle | Walt Mossberg’s gadget museum”.
If somebody put this design on Steve Jobs, his desk they’d be fired, I’m Walt Mossberg. I have been reviewing tech gadgets since the early 90s and collecting them since the 80s, and I wanted to show you some of my collection. So this is a real milestone product in consumer technology. It’S the first successful eReader, it’s the Amazon Kindle the very first one.
There were many tries at e-readers before Kindles and I was quite interested in it, so I reviewed them all and they all had huge problems either in terms of acquiring the books or reading the books or battery life or whatever. The Kindle was. The first thing that had, I think, a really terrific reading and buying experience within a few pages.
You completely forget that you’re reading on a Kindle – and that was our top design requirement, it’s an incredible way to get books. You can, you know one push of a button and you have whatever new book you wanted. I will say that it is one of the worst and ugliest industrial designs. It can’t be a flashing device. It’S really not that well designed it was clumsy. It was very easy to accidentally turn the page or this huge button here, which was also where you held it, and if you hit this button, the page returned.
So you were constantly turning the page when you weren’t ready to turn the page. It had a physical keyboard that was really funky it. The keys were kind of at strange angles to scroll, use this little wheel and then what looked like an old mercury thermometer would have some kind of indicator that went up and down in this little tiny window.
I mean it was just awful, I think, what’s carried forward from this is the idea that – and it’s still controversial among some people, but the idea that you carry around many many books in one fairly small device. They built Kindle apps that ran on other people’s platforms and worked seamlessly with these devices, or even, if you didn’t know in these devices, so they created a massive ecosystem around this, and that has been an enduring legacy of this. What went away was all this almost crippled around it look.
It was a first shot at something that was really important and became important when you think of eReader, as you think of Kindle it’s just it’s like Kleenex and that’s really a testament to what they did here. .