QWERTY Keyboards

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Permalink Reply by Al on May 13, 2009 at 7:52am

I'm with you, I have both a K1 and K2 and prefer the K1 keyboard by a wide margin.

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Permalink Reply by Andrys on May 15, 2009 at 8:26pm

I prefer the K1 keyboard too. Not to mention the @ key !!!

Even then I've learned to 'type' faster on it for some reason. But the DX one looks pretty nice. Not that I want such a big Kindle, actually.

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Permalink Reply by Woodrow Smith on June 13, 2009 at 5:36pm

I didn't buy the Kindle to type - I bought it to read! If I want to type, I use my laptop or my big hunking desktop. The only thing I wish Amazon would do with the keyboard is take it completely off the device and either give us more page space or make the whole thing that much smaller!

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Permalink Reply by Andrew Snyder on June 13, 2009 at 6:37pm

I agree completely. Can't wait for the touchscreen screen version so we can have that space and still search things on the kindle bookstore. Only a matter of time.

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Permalink Reply by Andrys on June 13, 2009 at 9:08pm

You'd search with a virtual keyboard that pops up instead? Those things are also universally hated, especially on the blackberry.

Not that many iPod users have used their device for any serious book reading except for the ones who say they are Kindlers and want their books available on their iPods. i'm reading a book about something real that happened, so I am constantly searching because there are so many characters and I want to be reminded who is who sometimes and I love that it gives me rows of results that I can click on but which have the names in context in the order they appear in the book. I do actually make notes with it.

I am also always webbing. I don't want the keyboard disappearing because some people don't want to use it. And I would like them to get a decent virtual keyboard before they dump the current one. I certainly don't carry my laptop everytime I go out, but I do carry my Kindle and I do type on it because I google a lot at stores or just out on the street looking for certain types of places.

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Permalink Reply by Andrew Snyder on June 13, 2009 at 11:01pm

I will just respectfully disagree. I have a ipod touch and can type quite easily on it, even enjoyable. I've read on it before but the screen is small, font, and strains the eyes. If it weren't for these facts I would be doing all my reading on the ipod touch rather then the kindle.

Also on the topic of "webbing", the kindles main purpose is to read books, not surf the internet. Even that being the case I believe a touch screen would greatly improve the experience of web surfing. Clicking links, scrolling up and down sites, and when you get to text boxes just click inside and the keyboard could easily show up on bottom.

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Permalink Reply by Andrys on June 13, 2009 at 11:30pm

Well,
'Webbing' on the Kindle may not be the "main purpose" but it is a MAIN purpose for others and myself or I would not be paying the $360, and the fact is that currently it's free for that wireless and is just a HUGE reason for some of us who use it to google outside or use yelp.com. That I even use it to check a forum or blog is no small deal for me and is the reason I bother to defend the Kindle for its $360 charge which would be indeed vastly overpriced, as others insist, if it were only for reading books.

Re a touch screen, that would be nice if well implemented, but there are downsides as in having to clean fingerprints off it since the Kindle's "main purpose" is for reading, which requires more concentration on what is actually being said by the writer than a lot of what I see in friend's use of their iPod for quick this and that.

My own iPod is an old-fashioned unit, its only "purpose" being, in the beginning, for the listening of music and a nice later purpose for showing our photographs (a feature that was added after they realized it was wanted). It has 60 gigs but the world rushed away with different thoughts of what its main uses might be and added pictures (which mine has) and then video (which mine hasn't).

All of which means that very often these devices seem meant for only one thing but human wants get in the way as does the vendor's desire for their money and then we get more and more features on what was once only a music player.

Having said that, for what is meant currently, the iPod is a very beautiful machine.

But back to the touch screen for those who want to read books on an e-reader, see David Pogue's
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/26/technology/personaltech/26pogue-e...

That gives some reasons it is good that it's not implemented yet for the Kindles until they can get past this problem with layers over the e-ink layer...

In a favorite Amazon forum thread (a favorite of mine, that is), people tell what unusual uses they put their Kindles to and there is a lot of added power in this "book reader" which is appreciated by many others of us.
http://tinyurl.com/kindlecreative

A basic book-reader should never be more than about $250 if that's all it's meant to do, but Amazon made the experimental web browser for even the Kindle 1, asks for feedback on the web browser in aone of their screensavers, and gives us pre-set bookmarks to go out and explore the web. So, that was also an intended use by them, looking ahead, in this world of ours.

I realize the keyboard makes the Kindle larger than some want but people use their Kindles differently and I just want to make it clear that for many, the Kindle is more than just a one-trick pony for that $360. Or now $489 with the DX.

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