My Kindle!

Update: I just realized I didn't add any pictures of how it looked like from the side and the back so I've added it in the entry now. Sorry.. me blur.

For the past few weeks, Ming has been telling me that he bought me the best Christmas present ever. He didn't want to tell me what it was until I saw it from myself but even Pierre who knew what it was said that it was freaking awesome!

So last week I finally made my way down to Singapore for some work and the very second I got into the car he threw a box at me and said "Merry Christmas! Open it!".

The box looked something like this.

It said Amazon.com on it so I thought that maybe he bought something off Amazon for me. A book ? DVD ? XBOX game? Something like that.

When I opened it though, I saw this.

At first I went

"What is this?"

And then it dawned on me... that it was an Amazon Kindle! HOLY SHIT!

The Amazon Kindle is an e-book reader from Amazon. It's basically a device where you can download all sorts of e-books from Amazon and store it inside. Then you can virtually carry hundreds of books in it wherever you want and take your time to read it.

It's unbelievably awesome!

Let me tell you why.

1) "Electronic-ink".

I read a lot of content now from the computer. Everything from news, blogs and all that. The thing about reading stuff off the computer though is that once you've been doing it for a long time it my eyes kinda get a little tired from the glare.

The Kindle though isn't one of those computer screens. The words on it appear really almost like it's on paper so there's no backlight and no glare.

So it's as easy to read as a book. Not sure about most of you but I can read articles on the computer but I can never read novels off it. I just can't seem to 'get lost' in the stories whenever I read them off a computer.

When reading off a Kindle though, my imagination takes me away just like reading off an actual book.

2) The largest book store in the world!

While I still love going to book stores just to browse, it's lots of fun browsing books on Amazon.com as well. Not to mention there are times when you want to go to a book store just to find one particular book and have to ask around or browse around in order to find it. On Amazon all you have to do is type it in the search bar and it'll find you the book.

I can't think of any book that Amazon doesn't already have! Only limitation is that while the Kindle books database is huge and growing, there are many titles not available on Kindle (but I'm sure they're working on that). Also you can't really buy Kindle books from Malaysia because the Kindle is not available here yet but there's a work around for that. All you have to do is buy a gift voucher from Amazon then redeem it for credit and use that credit to buy the e-book.

If you're in the USA it's even better. You can just buy the e-book from Amazon and it wirelessly gets sent to your Kindle.

3) No more carrying books around!

I read a lot especially when I travel. With the Kindle though you don't have to bring heavy books along with you. The Kindle is all you need. Plus it automatically book marks any page you stopped at so you don't have to be worried about losing your book mark or things like that. Plus there are some other bonus features the Kindle has. Like it has its own Oxford Dictionary so you can find the meaning of any word you're not sure of just by hovering a cursor over it on the Kindle and you can even make notes on each page.

Imagine if all our school students had this. No more lugging heavy school bags to school. Just this one device with all the text books you need.

I think the Kindle is truly revolutionary because if you think about it, that's how we may all be reading stuff off in the future. We will all each have a device like this next to our bedside tables. When we wake up in the morning, the daily newspaper and magazines are all wirelessly sent and updated to your Kindle so you can read it from there.

Think of all the paper we'll save (not to mention printing costs that newspaper and magazines can save).

I think the Kindle is great.

It's not yet available here in Malaysia or even Singapore yet though. So the only way to get it is to order it to a US address and then have it shipped over here. Ming went through all that trouble for me. Thanks Ming :)