A slew of new tablets and e-Books readers are due to hit this year, of course most notably the new Apple iPad. We’re lead to believe that 2010 is the year we really do finally start to say farewell to paper. There are plenty of skeptics on this one, a la “a paperless office is about as realistic as a paperless bathroom”– style thinking but we’ll see. I’m sure there will be plenty written about these topics (@granleese and @agreeves are no doubt already on the case). But what of the Amazon Kindle, does it have anything to offer? I was lucky enough to grab a Kindle shortly after they went on international sale in November last year. Two months, a dozen or so purchases and many free trial reads later, I feel ready to give some qualified opinion. Out of the box (nice packaging, wonder where they got that iDea from?) I switched it on and was greeted by name: Simon’s Kindle. It’s pre configured to my Amazon account to provide an instant closed loop experience, somewhat akin to iTunes. The Kindle connects to the Amazon store over the mobile internet, so no need to ever hook it up to a computer (except via USB for charging, or if you want to drop PDFs - yes they are now supported - or Word Docs onto the device).
Simon Morgan is a Partner at Mojo and Publicis Digital Australia. Known unaffectionately by his friends as fAdman, he has always got his fingers in several pies - usually somewhere at the intersection of advertising, creative, technology, pizza and ukulele. He is married to Miriam and together they wrangle three challenging young boys in Sydney, Australia.
