Kindle 2 Review

My Kindle 2, a present from my lovely wife, finally got here on 25th, just one day after the official release. From the time I opened the black packaging, I fell in love with it. Amazon has put a very clever "Once upon a time..." label on the packaging. Kindle 2 is very slim and Apple-esque.

What I like:

Harry Potter-ish reading gadget: Reading the New York Times on Kindle 2 feels like something straight out of a Harry Potter movie. The only thing missing: video! Instant delivery of books to Kindle is awesome!

The E-ink screen: It feels very nice to read books on Kindle. The screen continues to amaze me. No wonder it took 12 years and more than $150 million to create. The random photos of authors and scholars displayed when the Kindle 2 is turned off is very impressive.

No bill for EVDO Access: Amazon provides wireless functionality on Kindle 2 using Amazon Whispernet. I think having free EVDO access on Kindle is one of the main reasons it became popular. For non-Kindle owners, Kindle comes with WiFi access built in. I believe Amazon uses Sprint's EVDO network to power Kindle's Whispernet access. The cool part is you can browse web (see below), shop Amazon store, browse Wikipedia etc all directly from Kindle without monthly bills or service commitments. Here I appreciate Amazon's forward thinking.

Browsing the web: If you go in the experimental section of the menu, you can launch the basic web browser which is mostly suitable for text-only / mobile friendly sites. I was able to check my Yahoo email, Twitter and Facebook easily. You can also use mobile proxies to browse sites that aren't mobile browser friendly. For instance, one such mobile proxy site is mowser.

Text to Speech (TTS): Although, it's experimental, Kindle 2 features a TTS feature that can read anything on screen to you. I gave it a quick try, expecting that I will laugh at the reading capability of the software, but was pleasantly surprised. Apparently Amazon is having some issues with the Authors Guild that claims Kindle 2's TTS feature is a violation of copyright.

Listen to podcasts/MP3s: This is cool as well. You can connect your Kindle 2 to your computer using USB and then transfer podcasts and mp3 files to the music folder. Then, when using Kindle 2, simply press Alt-spacebar to start/stop playing the files. To go to the next track, simply press Alt-F.

What I don't like:

Missing Touch Screen: Kindle 2 is pretty cool but one thing that screams at you is the missing touch screen feature which would have added a lot of usability.

Five way navigation: I find it to be difficult to use and not very user friendly. Amazon could have used a better control unit. The next and previous page buttons are good but overall, the navigation is the most annoying part of Kindle 2.

Missing cover: Kindle 2 is a $359 gadget and it sucks that it doesn't come with a cover. Trust me, you are going to need a cover. I researched extensively for Kindle 2 covers but didn't like anyone that I was pleased it. Since I intend to carry my Kindle 2 around in my laptop bag, my requirements included, being able to zip-close the cover, some padding and less than $60.

Missing GPS Shortcut in Kindle 2. Even though Kindle 2 has a GPS enabled, EVDO functionality, it seems the old Kindle shortcut [Alt-1] no longer works. I wonder if Amazon turned it off completely or just assigned it a different shortcut. Can't wait till someone figures it out. My question to Amazon is, why take this useful feature out?

Kindle 2 Keyboard: I think the Kindle 2 keyboard is a massive improvement over the original Kindle (not that I owned the original Kindle), but I find that its not very user friendly, at least not for me. I can type much faster on my cell phone than on Kindle 2, however, that's not really a big deal. May be the keyboard is cleverly designed so that users won't use the Internet heavily on it?

Amazon charging for access to popular blogs: This is really stupid of Amazon. Even though you can browse the web directly and sign in to text-only feed aggregators, Amazon wants to charge users for convenient access to Slashdot, Boing Boing and other popular blogs. Recently I came across a new site Kindle Feeder that pushes/delivers the latest entries in your RSS/Atom feed collection to your Kindle. There has been some speculation that Kindle Feeder violates Amazon TOS. The creator of Kindle Feeder has apparently written a letter to Amazon's legal department asking for clarification. I, for one, intend to become a user of Kindle Feeder.

Removal of memory card slot in Kindle 2: The original Kindle came with a memory card slot. For some bizarre reason, Bezos' team has decided to remove that in Kindle 2, which really sucks! Hello, instead of moving forward, are we moving backwards?

My Predictions/Wishes:

Kindle as a standard for newspaper/magazine delivery: I think Amazon will either buy a newspaper or a big Newspaper publisher will invest heavily in Kindle or their own ebook readers. Hearst is apparently planning to launch their own. A recent analysis revealed that the New York Times can save more than $300 million every year if it shuts down its presses and buys every subscriber a Kindle. Those are some serious numbers and can provide a lifeline to the troubled publisher.

Kindle App Store: I hope Amazon realizes the potential Kindle has as a platform for applications. It would be great to see third party applications that take Kindle to the next level. Plus this could offer Amazon a new promising stream of revenue.

- O'Reilly's Safari Integration with Kindle: For quite some time now, I have enjoyed Safari's unlimited access to its library. I even had a tweet exchange with Tim O'Reilly regarding the possibility of Kindle supporting Safari. It seems that both O'Reilly and Amazon tried to do this but its not going to happen in near future. Too bad since I really enjoyed my Safari subscription and if I could access my $39.95 /month library on Kindle, I would have been ecstatic. But having Kindle in my hand with all my books on it really gives it a competitive advantage over Safari. Also, O'Reilly has this stupid policy of expiring token after a few months so the only time you can benefit from using Safari is if you are sitting in front of a computer with Internet access. I tried to accumulate tokens several times but almost every time they expired before I could use them to download chapters etc. So, when my current subscription period ends, I will be cancelling with Safari. Don't get me wrong, Safari may still be beneficial for those who are glued to their screens most of the time, as for me, I just don't get the benefit from it anymore. Now, there are PDF converters that will convert PDF files to Kindle friendly format. O'Reilly could have come up with a solution in the interim that allowed Kindle owners a different plan with an increased number of PDF tokens and to send it to Kindle. Sure, I'll be spending a lot more on books with Kindle but Safari isn't cheap either and at the end of the day/month, you don't even get to keep your tokens. So until Safari comes on Kindle, it's kind of dead to me.

Summary

Most of the things I mentioned here are the things I don't like in Kindle 2, but overall, I am hooked to it and very thankful to my wife for buying it for me. I can see myself using Kindle 2 intensively over the coming months and look forward to an even better and improved Kindle 3.

S3 Down for More Than 7 Hours

Amazon's S3 service went down today and more than 7 hours later, it is still down. The service initially went down around 12:00PM EST and my latest check shows troubles continuing for sites that depend on S3.

“Funny how Amazon doesn't use S3 to store any assets for amazon.com”tweet by @gruber

Smugmug, a popular photo sharing site with more than 600 TB of data stored on S3 has been accessible along with several "Web 2.0" startup sites. Because of the astounding amount of data stored by Smugmug on S3, it can definitely be considered a poster child for the service. Last time I checked Smugmug, at 11:10 PM EST, it was still inaccessible.

“As a consequence, a variety of businesses such as Twitter, digital photo sharing Web site, SmugMug and The Huffington Post all had issues. Twitterers were claiming their avatar images could not be displayed. The Huffington Post was also unable to display images to its stories, while SmugMug could not offer any service at all.
”ComputerWorld

This is not good for Amazon and for startups that are looking to count on Amazon's "redundant" S3 platform. Dr. Werner Vogels is probably pretty upset right now.

Werner Vogels: Keynote at Structure 08

Werner Vogels is now giving a keynote. He is the CTO of Amazon.com.

At Structure 10, the whole discussion will be different. We will be talking about different business models. This is a snapshot at the beginning of the movement. He showed an Animoto video presentation created by him.

What's so special about Animoto? They have no server infrastructure, even though what they do is very compute intensive. When they had 25,000 customers they were hovering around 50 instances. They launched a Facebook app that allowed you to import photos, create video and post it back to Facebook. At that point, they started signing up 25,000 customers per hour. They had to increase their instances to more than 5,000. Imagine Animoto going to VC and asking for money for 5k servers.

Cloud computing is moving the world from capital expenditure (CAPEX) to operating expenditure (OPEX). We are moving to a variable cost model.

Amazon is now in 7 countries with more than 79 million active customer accounts.

Bandwidth used by AWS is way higher than Amazon store.

Amazon used to be a technology consumer. Now, there is no third party software left at Amazon because of scale. There are more than 1M+ sellers. They moved from single application to a platform.

First 5-6 years, uptil 2001, Amazon was like a traditional site. The challenge was how do they keep scaling? How will we make it to the next year. Around 2001, Target came to Amazon and asked to be integrated. At the same time, a number of architecture pieces broke. Then they wanted to move to a platform while working on integrating Target.

At times, Amazon was thinking of going back to mainframe. They wanted to create a very agile environment.

They created an infrastructure where no direct database connections were allowed. Everything must go through a business logic layer.

The gateway page on Amazon can use upto 200+ services to be created.

The 70/30 switch

• Companies now have to become experts in many areas not related to their business and answer questions like, why is BGP protocol not stable?, why do datacenters go down? etc. These companies are spending upto 70% of time, energy and dollars on undifferentiated heavy lifting.
  
• Only 30% of time, energy and dollars are spent on differentiated value creation.

He is showing a photo of destroyed datacenter. If your data was in that datacenter, it is gone!. Now talking about 365 main which did 'everything right.' 6 of their 8 diesel generators failed and brought Web 2.0 down. At Amazon, the thought is to survive an entire datacenter failure.

Don't depend on Raid-5 to protect your data.

Peak capacity management is a big issue for companies such as Walmart.com and Target.com that experience seasonal spikes in traffic.

They wanted to cover three areas: compute, messaging and storage. EC2 covers compute, S3, Simple DB and EC2 PS (Persistent storage) covers storage and SQS is the fabric that holds everything together. EC2-PS still doesn't has a name.

Most data at Amazon was key-value based. There were secondary key accesses. SimpleDB was a compliment to S3.

It's easy for companies to spend as much as 70% of their intellectual capacity in scaling.

Infrastructure Services Drivers

1. Security
2. Scalablity
3. Availability
   
4. Performance
5. Cost-effective

Next he is showing example of SmugMug who relies heavily on Amazon's EC2 and S3. They currently have 600TB of pictures stored in Amazon S3. In Amazon S3 there are more than 18 billion objects as of March 2008.

SmugMug is now venturing in different businesses where they provide interface to allow you to store anything. The product is called Smugmug Vault.

Addressing Uncertainty

• Acquire resources on demand and release them
• pay for what you use
• leverage other's core competencies
• turn fixed cost into variable

What sense does it makes to order a lot of hardware when you don't even have a product? You also aren't sure how many customers you'd get.

Get everything from http://aws.amazon.com, you only need a credit card.

Amazon downtime costing the company est. $3.6 million

Today, Amazon suffered more than an hour long downtime. According to Adage, the downtime would cost Amazon an estimated $1.8 million per hour.

“It's hard to know exactly how many dollars a minute Amazon loses in sales for every moment its site is down, but simple math pegs it at about $1.8 million an hour, based on an Ad Age estimate that it will snare just shy of $4 billion in revenue during the 91 days of the second quarter. Of course, traffic tends to be lighter on weekends, heavier toward the beginning of the week. And it's not like everyone who can't get on Amazon immediately won't come back and buy their books or Kindle later. ”
According to Guardian, Amazon was down for about 2 hours.

While disasters are inevitable, this disaster for Amazon is especially important to consider because of Amazon's cloud computing service EC2 and mega storage service S3. Both EC2 and S3 promise high availability and many new startups depend on them.

Random stuff - Eid - Lunch 2.0 - Patents

Yesterday, I went to the first Lunch 2.0 in New York City organized by Brett Petersel and hosted by TheLadders.com. I have posted the photos to http://photos.mashraqi.com.

Friday was Eid. Went with Junad, Zubair and Michelle for Eid prayer.

Oh and yesterday I had a streak of 10 on pool. Yay!

Spent the weekend with Rob and Rachel from Tennessee. It was a lot of fun. We went to Seaport on Friday and Slate Plus on Saturday. Taso, Laura, Meg, Ronald and PJ also joined us.

USPTO finally rejects Amazon's stupid one click patent. It's really sad and shocking that Amazon got this patent in the first place.