Gadgetory

if somebody put this design on Steve Jobs his desk they'd be fired I'm Walt Mossberg I have been reviewing tech gadgets since the early 90s and collecting them since the 80s and I wanted to show you some of my collection so this is a real milestone product in consumer technology it's the first successful eReader it's the Amazon Kindle the very first one there were many tries at e-readers before Kindles and I was quite interested in it so I reviewed them all and they all had huge problems either in terms of acquiring the books or reading the books or battery life or whatever the Kindle was the first thing that had I think a really terrific reading and buying experience within a few pages you completely forget that you're reading on a Kindle and that was our top design requirement it's an incredible way to get books you can you know one push of a button and you have whatever new book you wanted I will say that it is one of the worst and ugliest industrial designs it can't be a flashing device it's really not that well designed it was clumsy it was very easy to accidentally turn the page or this huge button here which was also where you held it and if you hit this button the page returned so you were constantly turning the page when you weren't ready to turn the page it had a physical keyboard that was really funky it the keys were kind of at strange angles to scroll use this little wheel and then what looked like an old mercury thermometer would have some kind of indicator that went up and down in this little tiny window I mean it was just awful I think what's carried forward from this is the idea that and it's still controversial among some people but the idea that you carry around many many books in one fairly small device they built Kindle apps that ran on other people's platforms and worked seamlessly with these devices or even if you didn't know in these devices so they created a massive ecosystem around this and that has been an enduring legacy of this what went away was all this almost crippled around it look it was a first shot at something that was really important and became important when you think of eReader as you think of Kindle it's just it's like Kleenex and that's really a testament to what they did here