The newest iPad is awesome

I bought my wife the first generation iPad a couple of years ago. She loved it. I stuck with my iPhone. After hearing so much about the newest iPad, I broke down and got two. One for me, one for my wife and gave the old one to my son. So far it has lived up to the hype. The retina display is amazing for photos and the 1080p video is great!

When I got my first gen kindle, I remember feeling like I was on the starship Enterprise when I used it. Well, the iPad is even better! I can see Captain Picard walking thru the halls, reading his latest briefings on the iPad.

It's great for games. I love using twitter on it. I've discovered apps like Flipboard, which for a news junkie like me is just plain awesome! I've converted over half of my magazines over to the newsstand app. The ones I haven't are just because they aren't available yet. I'm disappointed that the Wall Street Journal isn't newsstand compatible; but it's own app works great.

I'm still not sold on iBooks though. I just like the look of e-ink better, and I prefer the feel of my 3rd gen kindle while reading for a long period of time.

Overall I give the new iPad 5 stars, and recommend you get the best one you can afford.

Kindle e-book reader

One of my partners got a Kindle e-book reader from her husband for Christmas, last year. She recently brought it to the office and let me play with it. Now I've got my own, and love it!!! The technology still isn't perfect, but this has been a great new toy!

I've had my Kindle now for about 1 month, and already I've downloaded over 30 books, either in full form or sample versions. No, I haven't read them all, yet. Like any new toy, I am giving it alot of attention.

Things I love:

1. Downloading free samples. It's just like going to the book store and spending time thumbing thru the paper edition. About 1/3 of the things I've downloaded have been in this format. When I get to them, if they interest me, I'll buy the whole thing.
2. The Kindle takes up much less space on my shelf! I love reading, and I tend to buy 2 new books while I'm still reading one. This gets on my wife's nerves. So now we don't need as much storage space.
3. The Whispernet. It downloads books in mere seconds.
4. The built-in dictionary. I've found that I use it much more than I thought I would.
5. It makes me feel like I'm an officer on the starship Enterprise when I'm using it!
6. There are tons of free or very cheap books available, not just the bestsellers.
7. I've read some complaints about the lack of backlighting. I guess a lot of people want to be able to read at the bottom of Mammoth Cave. Personally, I don't care about this. I already need light to read books, so it's no biggie.
8. Changing the text size is way cool!
9. I leave my Whispernet turned off while I'm reading, so the battery life is excellent. I charge it up about once a week, but even then, the batter is not fully discharged.

Things I don't like:
1. Still not enough titles. The Kindle is too new. Hopefully with time, more and more authors and publishers will get on board.
2. It doesn't render pictures very well at all. Amazon will have to continue to improve this technology if they really want to replace the printed word (which I don't think will ever really happen-books are here to stay). I can see college kids one day having all their textbooks on a Kindle, though. But not yet.
3. Amazon.com advertises "over 140,000 books". However, I have found that alot of these books are actually repeats. I think I found 5 or 6 different versions of Ben Franklin's Autobiography, all of them being offered at different prices. Don't really understand that logic. I guess some of them may have different comments from modern editors.
4. They do need to design a better cover. As long as I hold it tight, it's fine, but it does tend to slip out quite a bit.
5. The right hand "next page" button is placed at the very edge of the Kindle. Occasionally I'll shift my grip, and accidentally turn the page.