Amazon Kindle - paying the Early Adopter Tax

My wife was kind enough to let me play with her new Kindle which Santa bought her for Christmas. Unfortunately her stockings were full so she was forced to open her box early since there was no place to keep it until Christmas :-)

I'm very disappointed to report that the Kindle sucks. BIG TIME. OK, not entirely - the display is fairly nice - it's just the software that sucks. You need a PhD to navigate this thing. Anne downloaded the Wall Street Journal and we spent an hour trying to work out how to get to it. We eventually found a way in by pulling up the search box and searching for the word "Wall"...

That can't be right. There has to be an easier way.

Let's just say that the user interface on this thing owes more to Microsoft than to Apple. No, I'm being unfair to Microsoft there. Even comparing it to a Palm, the Palm would win. Come to think of it the last device I remember with such a bad UI was also an e-book - it was a Sony handheld back in the early days of ebook adventures, when you had a tiny mono lcd display about the size of a "game and watch", and the books were on mini CDs, encoded in SGML. I remember these quite well actually as I did the encoding for several of them for a little e-publishing house in London. Must have been around 84 or 85?

Anyway, back to the Kindle... it's at least 3 major releases away from being usable by mere mortals, and the price has to drop to about 15% of what it is now to even remotely justify it for any crowd other than the 'more money than sense' early adopters. Like us. :-/ (Do the math - if it costs $400, and you save $2 on each book by getting the e-version, you need to read 200 books just to break even. At the rate I'm currently reading books, I'll be about 70 years old by then. I wonder if the Kindle will still be working by then?)

I just wonder what Apple or Google would have done with this hardware...

You know I have a strong suspicion that the software is from the Chinese OEM and hasn't been alpha tested much by Americans or Europeans.

Still, as long as the hardware can be flashed to a new O/S, I guess we'll be OK in the long run.

Now to see if there are any good hacks out there. Maybe I should set up an ebook to html gateway so we're not tied to the Amazon store...