<i>the new device corrects some of the design flaws of the first model, adding round buttons instead of those strange angular ones, and smaller side buttons to avoid accidental page turns.</i><p>I received a Kindle as a gift and at first I hated the buttons. Now having read a dozen books or so, I think they are genius. I am sure they are making this change to satisfy the initial-reaction reviewers.<p>It can be a little to easy to accidentally press the side buttons on the original, something that happens to me a couple of times per book. This is greatly outweighed by the thought that went into them. It is really easy to press the buttons with an elbow, pillow or even your nose when need be. It makes reading a book a one- or no-hand operation.<p>Behind the screen, I would put the weird and unique buttons on the kindle as a top feature.
I always imagined this thing similar to consoles - you sell it at break-even (or even at a loss) to encourage the purches of books over its service.<p>Lord knows that if all it took was a quick bit of navigation on the Kindle itself to buy any book at Amazon, I'd have a full Kindle and an empty wallet.
I just want it to be GSM-friendly and to sell for less than US$ 100.<p>For the $100 to $500 range, I can use a full-featured entry-level notebook or a cheaper, lighter netbook. The Kindle has a big problem then.
I, for one, hope that "leaked" design isn't the actual redesign since judging by the pictures I liked the original better. The shape, while weird at first, works well for something you can hold easily in one hand. The large buttons allow you to hold it in much more varying positions without having to worry about have a specific finger rested in a specific place on the device to perform an action you are going to be doing quite often.<p>Plus, the new one looks quite a bit larger.
Hopefully Amazon made changes to their final design based on feedback on the Boy Genius Report 'leak':<p><a href="http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2008/10/03/amazon-kindle-2-ebooks-its-way-to-bgr/" rel="nofollow">http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2008/10/03/amazon-kindle-2-eb...</a><p><i>"...the battery does not look to be user-accessible, and there’s no more SD card slot..."</i>
I'm wondering when Amazon will bundle Audible's digital audiobook tech into the Kindle. Amazon acquired Audible last year and for some markets, like children's books, it's a no-brainer to sync narration with the written word.
Kindle should be software, not hardware. And it should run on as many different devices as possible--including my mobile phone, on which I read the newspaper and HN every day.