Thought Garage

This is the picture of an Amazon Kindle, I enjoyed for a really very short time before returning it today. May be a remarkable gadget on its own and may have been the most popular product on Amazon, but I found in a short amount of time I held it in my hands that its not for me. After spending a significant amount of time on my first generation iPad, Amazon Kindle felt like a feather, almost weight less. Give it to contrast theory.  But that was the only thing I really liked it. It is much smaller than it looks. Its Paper like screen, crisp font and little keyboard are nice but nothing impressive. I normally don’t go to a beach or sit in the backyard and read books in broad day light. I wish I could. But with a toddler in the family, only time you get to skim through a book is once kids go to bed. So, ability to read in a broad day light isn’t a feature for me. Moreover, lack of backlit display was indeed a big drawback. May be if you are reading colorless fiction, its black an...

iPad is now official and awesome. And in my view, there are two categories of products that will suffer a great deal if not completely get ignored in the market: Netbooks and e-Book readers (like Kindle) .  iPad will be a real break-through not because hardware (despite gigantic touch screen) or for software, but for great and intuitive user experience in consuming content. Finally, consuming content on web feels like reading a book or magazine, close to your heart. Something I always wanted. Hmm, I will be poor by at least another $500. The fact that any of those 140K apps that run on iPhone or iPod touch run on iPad without any modification is quite irresistible. And for those who already have an iPhone or iPod touch, using iPad is just natural and hence nothing exciting. It not only looks and feels like a gigantic iPhone or iPod touch, but powered by the same software core.