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iPad Vs. Kindle 2: eReader Showdown

2010-04-04
what's up everyone jon rettinger from technobuffalo here and by looking at the set up i'm guessing you can see that we've got a e-readers showdown for you in one corner we have the contender Apple's iPad and in the other we have the champion Amazon's Kindle too I do a lot of reading a vigor reader and I've done almost all of my reading at least for the almost the past year exclusively on the Kindle so I was very intrigued by the ipad its potential and its ibookstore so we're going to go through the stores and how they look and sort of declare a winner at the end of this but before we do that let's get a bit geeky and go over some of the specs the kindle two has a six inch eating display and you can see it's not backlit it's meant to look like a book or standard print paper it's got a massive too weak battery it really does last that long the battery is only being drained actually the pages are big turned when it's ass playing static content like this or a page the battery is not being used and it weighs about 10.3 onces it is very light the ipad has a 9.7 inch backlit LCD is a capacitive touchscreen battery lasts about 10 hours and it weighs a 1.5 pounds so with the backlit screen you've got no need for a light but you do get a bit of glare and reflection on the kindle on the other hand you do need to light if you want to read in the dark but you're not going to get the reflection that you're going to get with the ipad so again that's really going to be which one you prefer bigger screen real estate will see in a minute net does come into play so let's talk about the bookstore's the iBookstore that Apple just launched has about 60 thousand titles and the certain that that will grow amazon has a very mature bookstore uh that's not the funny it's been out for a while it's probably a better way to say that of about 450,000 Apple uses an open epub format for their books and kindle uses a proprietary kindle format and you might be doing great Apple using open format I can an ePub book and do whatever I want used on multiple devices not true FY used an open format and close it similar to what they did with AAC and iTunes so while it's technically an open format you're still with an apple walled garden here so let's take a look at the bookstores on each I'll go to ibooks I when it comes to pure eye candy this is really a no-brainer decision between the ipad or the kindle larger screen color can show a lot more so you're created with a shelf looks like a wood shelf of books you've got Winnie the Pooh is sort of the free one that comes included so let me show you what reading a book on here looks like and then I'll show you the bookstore so go ahead and open up whoo ok so I was just on one of the pages here navigation is pretty simple at the bottom of the page you've got that bar you can move along to any chapter that you'd like and if you want to turn the page just as you what I guess on a regular book you can actually flip the page over I believe you can just tap the margins too if you want to change a page if you don't want that animation but you do get it if you like sort of get the feel of actually turning a page over so we'll go and show you some more of the options here and you can see you get a lot of content on just one page now this does have an accelerometer so you can turn it any way you like and you actually get two pages per screen again you can turn the pages just as you would anything else so you get sort of a more book esque feel I'm going to go ahead and put it back into portrait for demonstration purposes so you can go ahead and go back to your library if you'd like you can go ahead and view the table of contents and jump right to a particular part you can view your bookmarks and jump right to them so we'll go ahead and just pick later chapter 2 you can adjust the brightness ride from here and that's actually important when you're doing web pages you may want a brighter screen but then may also have some eye strain so if you want to take the brightness down and get sort of a closer feel to what the ink looks like you can actually pull the brightness down right from the display and the theory behind that is that you'll have less eye strain go ahead and put that back up you can change you font size to the whatever size you like you can even pick the font that you'd like and you go ahead and search for a particular word you've got some options for the text as well you can hold down you can pick or get book market you can search it you can look forward and dictionary if you don't know what the word means and you get since its color you get to the pictures look as it wouldn't in an actual book which is nice if you're reading a story to a child or something you can actually show them the picture so let's take a look at the kindle go ahead and push this off to the side i will take a look here at let's say superfreakonomics one of the books that I'm currently reading go ahead hit okay they're just going to do a little bit of sinking and that's something to keep in mind as well the amazon kindle has something that's kool go whispernet which actually will sync your content amongst all of your kindle devices so you'll always be on the same page now reading here you're going to get pretty much same options you get up your Regan actual book the e-ink display does create very minimal eyestrain move that off to the side get a bit distracted does create very minimal eye strain is really nice easy format it is a bit smaller it's six inch screen so it shows less content pages are turned by buttons and everything is done by but this is not a touchscreen Inc sony i believe has a touch bring one and all the pages are conducted just by turning and tapping the button it's a very nice way to read a book you get sort of a feel of actually reading real text because of the display and it's quite nice now you do get some menu options some options as well for customization to go ahead and hit menu you can see what some of those are you can jump right the table of contents you can view the cover and go the beginning go to your locations you can sync it like I just mentioned you could view the description of the book you can search this book for a particular word add a bookmark and this also has a built-in dictionary as well which is nice reading a book you don't know what xenophobic or loquacious means you go ahead and look it up and you know what that is as far as customization options you get a decent amount of things with the kindle to read did the book back to you and a very robotic voice and you can change the font size as well this round is really good after your personal preference whether or not you can deal with the eye strain and the brighter larger display of the iPad or that you prefer sort of a more traditional book look of the ink personally I like being able to have more text on a page and like being able to see the images and the animation sort of appeal to the geek in me so from a personal standpoint i prefer the ipad however i have not read many many many books on this yet as nearly as I have on a Kindle so I have an experience I astray that's something to keep in mind as you do continue to use the device this one's give me a personal decision but for me it is the ipad let's go and check out the bookstores and see what that looks like so we'll jump back to the library we'll go ahead hit store and you get a very similar store look and feel that you get on the iPad with itunes or the App Store to go ahead and do books new books here are about 12 99 a bit more expensive actually on the iPad than they are on the Kindle although they do have very generous previews so let's pick a book here we'll go silencing opens up you get a description you get the ratings and you get samples that one thing i should say about the samples they're very generous here sub-samples have you been upwards of 100 pages samples on the Kindle you're generally going to get the first chapter both of which would give you enough to read and get a sense from that you want to buy the book but the samples tend to be a bit longer I can view all the ratings you can be the first to rate you've this typical star ratings or just go ahead and buy and tap that or get sample go right to the author's page or if you want to email the book to a friend there are a ton of free choices here as well go ahead and scroll down a ton of free books you go ahead and pick a lot of the classics actually minutes sort of been floating in the ether for a while so let's go back to feature no download a sample and show you what that looks like so here's the bullpen gospels I'm a baseball fan so we'll just get the sample so it rotates and it shows up right on your bookshelf tap it and you go ahead and start reading it the same options that we just talked about go back to the store so like I mentioned where you're limited to just about 60,000 titles on the iPad at launch although I applies promise that will grow and buy time for watching this video you know these two may be at parity but for right now the kindle has a very very large advantage so I you got some a search functionality works i was looking up superfreakonomics one of the again the books i'm reading now you saw on the kindle just typed it in both up a suggestion if they have the book you get sort of the same options that we just saw before go ahead and go back you can view by featured new york times bestsellers to scroll through all those top charts the top paid books and whatever purchases that you've made adventure they don't have any on here yet so let's push the ipad off to the side and take a look at the kindle book store we'll go to back to the home screen will go to menu and will shop in the kindle store now it's certainly less elegant but it's as functional as the iPads again the ipad has a lot of eye candy which you may or may not like this is more of a traditional ebook which is funny to say traditional with a very digital format so you can view browse by books newspapers magazines or blogs same options new york times bestseller kindle top sellers and some daily post and some books ever recommended to you based on purchases so let's go to New York Times bestsellers now the ipad i should mention uses Wi-Fi i'm testing the Wi-Fi only version there will also be 3g version which i use AT&T this version that kindle i'm using is the older kindle to which has Sprint's evdo rev a network newer versions that are global youth AT&T as well but do not have Wi-Fi so you're doing just a cellular network so you go ahead and pick a book here's the girl with the dragon tattoo and open that up and you get some information on it as well you get the customers who bought this also by and get the ratings and then go ahead and download a sample very similar i can mention the samples are just about a chapter long and search works just the same type superfreakonomics again and this does have a full on screen keyboard the ipad uses a virtual keyboard here you've got actual buttons which some people tend to prefer go ahead and search the sort and it will pull it up and i can go ahead and buy that now the options for reading the books what the home screen looks like just a gridview and go ahead and pick the book you want tap in the d-pad and opens it right up like you saw there with superfreakonomics so when it comes down to the bookstore having more books is better than having i think a prettier bookstore to look at so i think the Kindles got it when that just based on sheer number now if the ipad ever reaches parity as far as number of titles I've in the eye candy may be nice so right now we're about tied up you know it's getting any personal preference but not you prefer the larger screen of the iPad or the smaller eating of the kindle but there is a big big big trump card here when it comes down to deciding which ebook reader you want to get and that is right here the kindle app amazon has released a kindle app for the ipad essentially giving the ipad access to every book in the kindle book store and take advantage of its whispersync network so your books are always sunk up you can download and buy any book that you can on the Kindle right here on the iPad so here is a superfreakonomics we were just talking about and I get that now for this location go ahead know and i can go ahead and scroll through page i don't get the same animations but i can jump right to the next page as I could on the Kindle except now I've got a bigger screen to look at it and I've got access to again all those same books let me show you again some about the kindle app will go ahead and shop in the kindle store and it's going to go in launch the browser to take me to amazon com we're essentially i can buy any book that i want an amazon native format and for me this is an absolute killer application i get not only do i get access to apple's ibookstore sort of all the cool graphics i also get access to amazon's entire catalog every book they have so if i can't find something in Apple 60,000 catalog I can certainly find it in amazon's 450,000 from catalog you've just so many more choices here with the ipad if you can deal with the backlit backlit screen and you can take the brightness down to decrease your eye strain this one really is a no-brainer the ipad is clearly the better choice in my opinion for any reader now something to keep in mind as well it does weigh 1.5 pounds so can get a bit heavy while holding if you want to sit on down on the couch and put on your knees not a problem or read it in bed before we're going to hold it the 1.5 pounds can weigh a little bit more than you may like so guys this has been jon rettinger with a head-to-head of probably what i assume we're going to be the two most popular eBook readers on the market the apple ipad and kindle two and in addition to just being able to read all the books here the ipad gives you a lot of other things safari mail and ton of other things up covered in previous videos so guys i'm jon rettinger from TechnoBuffalo and for all your ipad news tips and tricks be sure to check out the channel and technobuffalo calm where you can make your own tech website interact with people and even make a few bucks by putting in your own ad code alright guys if you liked the video give it a thumbs up but appreciate it i'm jon rettinger and i'll see you in the next video bye bye
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