Robert Scoble was quietly raving about the Kindle for the last week but as he says, it’s easy to get geeks excited by new and shiny and much harder to excite the mass market.
- No ability to buy paper goods from Amazon through Kindle.
- Usability sucks. They didn’t think about how people would hold this device.
- UI sucks. Menus? Did they hire some out-of-work Microsoft employees?
- No ability to send electronic goods to anyone else. I know Mike Arrington has one. I wanted to send him a gift through this of Alan Greenspan’s new book. I couldn’t. That’s lame.
- No social network. Why don’t I have a list of all my friends who also have Kindles and let them see what I’m reading?
- No touch screen. The iPhone has taught everyone that I’ve shown this to that screens are meant to be touched. Yet we’re stuck with a silly navigation system because the screen isn’t touchable.
It seems apparent to me that Kindle would have done a lot better if released one year ago but like the Nokia internet tablets, I’m betting that Amazon is trying to build a platform here.
The crazy thing is the comparison to the iPhone.
This gripe list reads to me like a iPhone wish list for OSX version 1.5. I’d expect that we’ll see some new features on the iPhone come February but anyone who’s Mac-development savvy should be getting up to speed with Leopard, Core Animation (LayerKit), Objective C 2.0 and starting to fill these gaps.
Build a Reader application which will hook into the dozens of online novel repositories, read PDF. Make a deal with O’Reilly to get their book into the new format (even if it is just reformatted PDF). Make the sharing thing real, make it like your book lending. Get Wil Shipley to make Delicious Library more than just what it does. What if it actually stored your books and allowed you to lend them in a reader format. How freaking cool would that be? Make it hook into the net to tell you when friends are online so you can send them your books directly over the net, rather than having to be in the same room.
Make sure the iPhone has capability of social networking. I’m not talking about MyFaceBeboSpaceBookster here, I’m talking about drawing the social network away from the big firms and where it belongs. Sure, there will be some rich apps for JaiTwitterMicroFaceBlogging (like my earlier mentioned Ghost) but realistically we really need to take back what is ours rather than waiting for big companies to provide it. Let’s see something from developers to fill that gap.