The Investigation

I started out by reading up a bit on both devices.  I read complaints about performance on the Nook, but also saw mention that an update was released which improved the situation significantly.  The specs told me that the Nook was slightly thicker and ever so slightly heavier, but otherwise roughly the same dimensions and basic capabilities.  In theory the color touch screen and Android-powered nature of the device made it appealing.  In theory.

So one afternoon I took a drive over to the B&N store in Bellevue to take a good look at the Nook in-person.  My first impression was that the industrial design looked cheap compared to the Kindle 2 I’d seen.  I played around with the device a bit, and found the page-turning speed acceptable but not exactly impressive.  Navigating the device’s various functions seemed relatively cumbersome, but I didn’t have a basis to compare this to the Kindle at the time.

As I was looking at the demo device on display, a salesperson asked if I needed help and tried to tell me how much they’d like to get a Nook of their own.  I inquired about the return policy, and was told to wait while they called down a manager to talk to me about the device.  The manager (or supervisor, or whatever she was) was very enthusiastic about the device, but I was put off a bit by her pitch.  First, she told me there was a 15% restocking fee if I returned the device (I forget if it was a 14-day or 30-day return policy).  She said this was “standard for these kind of electronics” to which I replied that the Kindle did not have such a fee and neither did stores like Best Buy and Fry’s.  I also inquired whether there was a web browser on the device, and she said “no but the Kindle doesn’t have one either.”  I pointed out that the Kindle actually does have a basic browser, and she insisted it was only the Kindle DX which offered this feature.  Of course, I quickly confirmed using my Droid that she was indeed incorrect.

Given all this, I decided to leave B&N without one, and a couple days later I ordered a Kindle.

The Arrival

I ordered the Kindle late on a Thursday evening, and decided to take advantage of Amazon’s same-day delivery option, a concept which nearly blew my mind, to have it arrive on Friday.  Sure enough, it arrived at my building Friday afternoon.

Unpacking the Kindle is a delightful experience.  The device arrives pre-programmed with your Amazon account.  There was no registration process of any kind, it was as if this device knew me and was anxious to be my new reading companion.  The Kindle store was already populated with book recommendations based on my Amazon history, and the device happily sync’d the two books I’d purchased on the Kindle for iPhone app a few months before.

I was immediately glad I’d chosen this over the Nook.  Amazon had clearly put significant effort into building a complete end-to-end experience with minimal friction to purchasing and reading books or other content.  In some respects, it even seemed they’d outdone Apple, who many consider to be the king of this kind of execution.

The device looks and feels solid.  The plastic feels more expensive and higher quality than that of the Nook.  The size and weight are pretty much ideal for its purpose.  The button placement is well thought-out, and the labels make it trivial to pick up and start using.  They duplicate certain buttons (like “Next Page”) and seem to have considered all the different ways you might hold the device when reading on a park bench, in bed, etc.

Navigating the device may not be as delightful as an iPhone, but it’s easy to figure out and get around.  Common tasks are easy, what feels a little clunkier are secondary tasks like selecting text within a document – but it’s still easier than it seemed on the Nook.

The display updates slightly faster for page-turns than the Nook, which seems just fast enough to not be annoying when reading.  That is, the Nook is only marginally slower, but it seems to cross a threshold where it starts to feel slow.

Web Browser

The Kindle web browser is very basic, and given the performance characteristics of the hardware and lack of a pointer, it’s not hard to see why.  Typical web browsing tasks simply won’t work on this hardware.  That said, I think the basic browser is quite useful, and mainly for one application: Google Reader.  Now, to be honest, I haven’t spent a lot of time actually using this in practice… but the short time I did spend using it, it felt quite usable and useful.  I imagine I will use that regularly in the future, unlike most any other web browsing functionality.

One gripe with the browser was the inability to re-order bookmarks.  Or at least, if you can re-order them, I couldn’t figure it out.  Instead I had to delete all the built-in bookmarks (about a dozen) which is a slow enough process, just to get Google Reader to be at the top.  Given that the browser is labeled as an “experimental” feature at this point, I can’t really complain too much.

Verdict

At this point I’m pretty confident I’ll be keeping the Kindle.  At first I thought maybe an iPad or similar slate PC might obsolete it, but now I’m not so sure.  The iPad, for example, is about twice the weight of the Kindle.  I don’t think that’s going to be comfortable for extended reading sessions.  Once I get to try an iPad myself I’ll try to update this post with my impressions with regard to its usefulness as a book reader.  Until then, I’m happy to recommend the Kindle to any avid readers or gadget freaks.

I never really had any experience with PHP until I started dabbling in WordPress, but it was easy enough to pick up the basics, and the WordPress “API” documentation for building “themes” is quite good.  It provides all the infrastructure for the site and great tools for content editing and publishing, leaving me to only worry about the design and layout of the site itself (and in turn letting the content people worry just about content). 

As an example, the new site I’m working on has a “featured content” slideshow on the home page that I designed using JavaScript and a little PHP.  The PHP code calls into WordPress and grabs the latest 5 pages tagged with “featured” by the editors, and it pulls an excerpt and image from them to display sequentially in a nice little slideshow to show off new and featured content.  WordPress made this easy for me to develop, and makes it easy for my less technical friends who do the content to make use of it.

Now don’t get me wrong, I love ASP .NET.  If I were writing a web service or any kind of complicated web application I’d use that without a doubt, if only because I’m more comfortable in C# and the relevant tools than with their open source / Linux alternatives.  In fact, that’s why BrandonTools.com runs on a Windows server – I had (and still have) some plans to dabble in some web service projects, and so I put that site on a Windows server so I could at least host prototypes there.

Unfortunately, the Community Server software powering BrandonTools.com hasn’t impressed me at all.  In fact, I’m probably going to ditch it soon if I can find a good alternative and can find a reasonable way to migrate as much content as possible.  It’s a shame really, and for me proof that the effectiveness and utility of applications are often more important than the details of underlying technology, or the philosophy with which it was developed.

So for straight-up web site design, I’m hooked on WordPress, and not afraid to admit it.  At the moment it’s clearly the best tool I’ve found for the job.  I would love to see an equivalent platform get developed for Windows / ASP .NET, and who knows, maybe something like Oxite will get there some day.  But so far WordPress seems to be in a league of its own, not just as a blogging platform but as a very effective content management platform – particularly with their latest 2.7 update which really raised the bar.

Oh and did I mention that in 2.7 its web configuration tool has a one-click in-place upgrade option that pulls down the latest version directly from WordPress.org and applies it to your site?  Yeah, it’s seriously slick.

It looks like a work-in-progress, and since his service works as a proxy to talk to Flickr, performance isn’t what it would be if Flickr had a native implementation.  But for something he threw together over the last night or two I’m impressed!

We’ll be talking more about Search Federation on the Engineering Windows 7 blog soon, and will have much more to share when we deliver the upcoming Windows 7 beta release.

I absolutely cannot wait until this is released to the public.

• It takes 10-15 seconds for a (standard def) video from Xbox Live to be ready to play.
• I frequently download files at about 2 MB/sec from good servers.
• Orb is amazing with 15mbps upload
• Same goes for Remote Desktop
• Bit Torrents aren’t choked by stupid Comcrap throttling software
• My connection doesn’t drop momentarily every few minutes like it did with Comcrap, kicking Trillian off of AIM and causing lag in Halo.
• Sure, it’s not even been a week, but the service has been operational 100% of that time.  No middle of the night service interruptions so far.

In case you missed it, they announced “The Platform” today at their f8 conference. 

There are already 30+ applications right out of the gate.  There’s Twitter integration, there’s the “Causes” application (I’ve already created a “cause” for Tusubira using it), there’s Box, Feedburner, and more.

Color me impressed.

What does it mean?  Those numbers stand for freedom. 

Why do I bring this up?  Well, fellow MS blogger Sanaz Ahari made a post earlier this month linking to a video I’d not seen before, with some incredibly interesting data about the distribution of wealth, health, and technology over the last 30 or so years between and within countries from all around the world.  It’s not the shortest video ever, and if you’re used to watching 30 second news blurbs you might not get much out of this as it’s a bit longer than your average NBC world news segment.  But the data presented is so compelling, and the presentation so engaging, that I had to share it.

I know, I know… the Wiki just went up a few days ago. Well, rather than let people get too used to that, I decided to go ahead and set up a real website for Start++ and any other little tools I end up throwing together (I mean, diligently coding to the highest standard of quality!) later on down the road.

It’s just up and stumbling on Community Server, which seems to be working out pretty well so far.

BrandonTools.com

However, tonight I was hanging out with some of the MVPs (mostly the young, hip Windows Live ones) and finally decided to sign-up. With MVPs looking over my shoulder, the sight of the words “Welcome back, Robert Scoble!” proved to be an irresistable temptation.

Anyway, I’m on Twitter now. It’s pretty much the Facebook “status” feature, ripped out and offered as a standalone service. The real difference is the network of people. Facebook has my friends from high school, college, and most of my 20-something friends all on board. But Twitter has… the entire blogosphere. Or maybe that’s just Scoble’s Twitter followers.

That’s the path we took.

Check out photos from our flight

If anything makes me trade in my A3 in the next year or two, this would probably be it:

Audi A5 / S5 details

Lots of people are linking to this post. A much better place to link would be to the new Start++ web site. Thanks!

I’ve decided to share a little tool that I wrote on a whim a week or two ago for Vista.  This is a personal project of mine, not related to MS in any way.

Users of WDS on XP may recall the “Deskbar Shortcuts” functionality that allows you to create little aliases between words or characters with commands and searches.  For example, you could set up the Deskbar so that you could type “g Stuff” to search for the work “Stuff” on Google.  You could also launch programs, run scripts with parameters, and more.

Windows Vista replaced the Deskbar with Instant Search built-in to the Start menu, which is totally awesome.  Unfortunately, it lacks all of that fun shortcut functionality that the Deskbar had.  Unless you have my tool, which for the time being I’m calling Start++.

Here are a few of things it does:

This will open the “Longhorn Server” page on Wikipedia.

This will launch Visual Studio with administrator permissions.

Start++ also works from the command line!

Search Actions let you perform actions over search results.  In this case, “Play Radiohead” will:

1. perform a search for music with the keyword “radiohead”
2. Write all the results to a .M3U file
3. Open the results in Media Player

That’s the configuration UI, which lets you create your own custom commands / aliases.

Like I said, this is kind of something I threw together, so it might still have some bugs, and I’ll probably add more to it when I get the time on weekends and such.  Anyway, let me know what you think.

Download Start++