Helpful reader Shawn Baker e-mailed me recently to ask if I still liked Amazon's Kindle e-book reader, after having used it for several months. Which is a fair question for any reviewer. Usually, I write a review after a couple of weeks of real-world testing, but it's often a couple of months before I have to return a loaner unit back to the manufacturer, and sometimes I like something so much that I just plain buy it. So I have plenty of time to really get to know a piece of hardware across a multitude of situations.
I won't tease Shawn and make him wait for an answer: My opinion of the Kindle has improved since my original review. If you spend a fair amount of time reading electronic text, there might be a Kindle-shaped hole in your life this device can cleanly spackle.
Over the last several months, I'd say that more than two-thirds of my Kindling has been for keeping up with Weblogs via Google Reader. It's the free, unlimited access to Sprint's nationwide high-speed wireless data network that elevates the Kindle into something special.
Purchasing e-books through the Kindle Store is merely a backseat feature. Analog books are still handier and a better value. Though more than once, I've bought the electronic edition of a hardcover I already owned because I wanted to continue reading it on a trip and didn't want to haul that thick chunk of wood to San Francisco and back.
The serious weakness of the Kindle is its physical build. I've still yet to figure out how to pick the thing up off a table without accidentally turning pages; the "hardcover" sleeve that protects it in your backpack is clumsy, and the cheap plastic panel that covers the battery and memory card slot keeps falling off.
Overall: very nice if digital text plays a big role in your life.
MACBOOK AIR
Taking Apple's MacBook Air on several trips really proves the strengths and weaknesses of Apple's ultralight Mac. Apple had to cut some eye-browsing corners in order to build a notebook that's this (freaking) thin; the cost here is that the Air is by no means a "volkscomputer," a machine that works well for any average user.
I'm here at a conference at the University of Colorado. I came back to my hotel with 6 gigs of photos. Dumping my photos is no problem for my own MacBook or any other notebook. But the Air has just one USB port, an adequate but by no means cavernous internal hard drive, and no internal DVD burner, so it's a game of musical chairs: plug in the camera, copy the photos to the hard drive, disconnect camera, connect external hard drive, copy over the photos, and then free up that precious space on the internal.
OK, but Apple isn't selling this as a computer for everybody. They're selling it as a machine for someone who needs a feather-light, paper-thin "real" notebook. The Air truly sets its hook in you after a month of carrying it around . . . between different parts of the country and even different parts of the house. For users whose lives revolve around documents, e-mail, and the Web, it's a machine with very few compromises.
DROBO STORAGE
I remain a fan of Data Robotics' Drobo storage system. This is the toaster-like USB storage device featuring four bays that you fill with hard disk mechanisms. Need more storage? Replace one or more drives with higher-capacity ones, without needing to back up your existing data or even power down the unit. All of your data is stored redundantly, so a removal or meltdown of one drive won't lead to a loss of data.
Its drawback is right there in those three letters: USB. It's much slower than a device that connects to your computer via Firewire, which makes it impractical for high-performance use.
SCRIVENER
Finally, I've become such a pants-wetting fan of Scrivener, a Mac word processor that almost reinvents this category of software, that I gotta fit in another rave for it. It's quickly become one of those Five Apps I Can't Possibly Live Without. I do all of my writing on it. Microsoft Word is now like an awful Metallica tattoo I wore for 15 years before getting it lasered off, only the process was instant and trivial, not painful.
Andy Ihnatko writes on technology issues for the Sun-Times.
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