Kindled

For several weeks now, RantWoman has had...a Kindle.

The verdict?

There is much to like and much to be annoyed by; RantWoman has to admit that some of the annoyance may be RantWoman factors that any vendor will be hard put to overcome.

RantWoman has one of the low-end models, not the high-end model with all audio controls. RantWoman has enough vision in small time increments to be able to find the controls to turn on reading of menus and to find the buttons necessary to scroll through menus and turn on Text to speech every time she opens a document. RantWoman considers the need to do this a nuisance, but apparently not enough of a nuisance to pop for the more expensive model.

RantWoman is kind of wishing she had paid more attention and gotten the 3G connectivity option. However, RantWoman feels really lucky to have plenty of Wi-Fi about for most of her needs. But then RantWoman really does not feel obliged to be permanently in tune with the ether either.

RantWoman really likes:

Friendly customer service. At some point, RantWoman got a hostile error message but the hostile error message contained a phone number which took RantWoman to an actual live human and a live human taking calls at a date and hour RantWoman would not necessarily have predicted.

The size

The brightness of the display and some contrast control options RantWoman has not played much with.

the tactile keyboard even though RantWoman would not mind if some frequently-used keys had something to make them more easily findable.

The adjustable font size.

The male voice. RantWoman has tried the female voice briefly and likes the male one better. RantWoman found the volume control by accident and would like ever so much to have a speed control to increase the reading speed for the text-to-speech option.


RantWoman is challenged by:

Her capacity to fall asleep while reading the instruction manual. Boring content is one issue; the other seems to be that RantWoman just has not become as adept at pulling key chunks of content out of audio streams as she was when she could read visually. WHINE.

The lack of physical indicators to help scroll through content. RantWoman finds it reassuring to be able to use her fingers to get 1/3 or 3/4 of the way through something and then do more fine-grained thumbing some other way. RantWoman thinks she would find this lack of physical orienters challenging whether she were dealing with a Kindle, various of the Braille devices she occasionally contemplates, or, say, a tablet PC. Double whine.

Inability so far to figure what incantations she needs to murmur or what format transformation path she needs to find in order to be able to read PDF documents text-to-speech. RantWoman means to persevere in her attempts, but RantWoman finds the topic vexatious. For one thing, RantWoman downloaded a bunch of things connected with her faith community and the Kindle not only refuses to read them aloud, it also insists on partial inadequate zoom instead of the lovely text size adjustment RantWoman has found on actual Kindle content.

Bafflement about how to clear things out of her directory, either PDF files RantWoman cannot make work or free content RantWoman does not want to have to keep scrooling through. RantWoman supposes there are probably instructions about this in the instructions manual. Now if only she could either stay awake to read the manual or find a physical way to get quickly to the right section. Or call customer service...

RantWoman supposes she could have worse problems.

RantWoman may in fact really like her Kindle anyway.

RantWoman reads: Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul. As much exotica as her trvel budget will support, part literary essay, part autobiography, part reflection the march of history. The writing is very male, which in this case means, among other things that there are many wonderful, clear well-crafted moments but the complexities of one-on-one human interaction figure less than for other writers. RantWoman persists in enjoying the book anyway.