Reviewing the Kindle is a unique challenge. No matter what cool technology is inside of it, no matter how many buttons or how long the battery lasts, it’s still a device that’s inherently designed to read books, a task that takes time. This isn’t something that you pick up to consume your media quickly and randomly, like an iPod or a mobile phone. It’s an investment in not only dollar terms, but also time.

The very first thing you notice about the Kindle when you take it out of its (expediently delivered) box is that its screen is on. Or at least it looks that way. No matter how many times you read or are told that e-ink displays draw no power unless they are changing, it’s still weird to see an image on the screen when turned off, which is what happens every time you flick the switch on the Kindle.

The second thing is that Amazon looked long and hard at the iPod original iPhone before designing the Kindle. Thin and white on the front, brushed aluminium on the back with a section of plastic, presumably for the built-in SIM card. Sure there are more buttons on the front of the Kindle, but this device is made for reading books, not watching video or listening to music. But the similarity in design is unmistakeable.

The device comes pre-loaded with a guide on how to use the device, as well as a dictionary. Scrolling through the guide will give you a good idea of how the device works, but rather than sit through that, I opted to get straight to downloading from Amazon’s store.

According to Laura Porco, Director of Merchandising at Amazon, the Australian Store launched last week with about 280,000 titles, which has swelled to about 288,000 this week. The US Store has about 370,000 books available to download for the Kindle. But apparently the books available for Australians aren’t a subset of the 370,000 US books – we have books the US doesn’t, they have books we don’t… And the same is true for all the new markets the Kindle is selling in. Amazon is working with local publishers and authors to try and add more content all the time. Doing a quick search of readily known Aussie authors, I got a lot of empty searches: Thomas Keneally, Matthew Riley, Kate Forsyth and Banjo Paterson all turned up blanks. Fantasy writer Ian Irvine’s Human Rites trilogy is available, but that’s it. Tara Moss, for better or worse, has a couple of books available too. Still, given time, we’ll only see more Aussie authors pop up on the device.

The built-in 3G Whispernet service works pretty well. It uses an AT&T SIM card and a global roaming arrangement, which doesn’t actually cost you anything – there are no subscription fees or mobile data plans involved. There is a slight premium on book purchases, but we’ll get to that later. Exactly what network it works on in Australia is unknown – Amazon were as tight lipped as Apple about specific details, and looking at AT&Ts roaming website, it looks like they have arrangements with all the Aussie telcos. In any case, downloading a book takes less than a minute – even for something as chunky as War and Peace.

Actually using the device is pretty easy. The next page buttons are big and conveniently located – it’s easy to walk and read – easier than with a real book, anyway. The keyboard’s kinda horrible, but considering it has limited use (both searching for books, searching for text within a book or taking notes), it’s not a big deal. It’s certainly no worse than using touchscreen input on a Winmo or Android device.

What some people may find irritating is the slow refresh rate of the e-ink screen. In a world where LCDs have 2ms refresh rates, the fact that it seems to take almost a second to change the image on screen could prove frustrating. Personally, it doesn’t phase me considering it takes about the same amount of time to turn a page, but that’s just me. In any case, e-ink is an ideal format for a digital book – reading in bright sunlight is no problems whatsoever, unlike an LCD.

Another potential issue for customers is the fact that everything is in US dollars. both the device itself, and the books you purchase for it, are all charged in US dollars. While that’s all well and good now, while the Aussie dollar is kicking arse and taking names, if it drops down to the 50 cent mark again, you’ll end up paying almost double for the same book. Amazon may change this in the future – they said that they’re running everything out of their US site for convenience rather than profit – although they refuse to comment specifically on future plans. As it stands, you can grab classics for $US2.99, with new releases going for $US11.99, and a whole raft of pricing in between.

If the dollar does crash though, it’s worth noting that the Kindle does read mobipocket files, which you can copy over via the included USB cable. By checking out Project Gutenburg, you can download hundreds of out of copyright books for free and read them on the Kindle. It also does plain txt files, although there are some weird formatting issues with that…

While we’re on the topic of the USB cable, it’s also worth mentioning that the device doesn’t come with a wall charger, just a USB cable. Not so big a deal, until you discover (as Jen Dudley at the Courier Mail did in her review) that the Kindle won’t charge with a USB wall charging adaptor – it only works plugged into your PC. Weird decision on Amazon’s part.

A couple of other things I haven’t mentioned: You can change the font size easily, which is great for those with weaker vision, and the text-to-speech functionality is included as well. It sounds kinda freaky, and you’ll probably never use it, but it’s there for books that publishers have allowed it to work on. You can also subscribe to Newspapers and magazines from around the world (there’s a free two week trial), although most of the pictures have been pulled out. Oh, and no Australian publications yet either, which kind of kills the allure for me. Finally, you can use the inbuilt dictionary to look up any word in any book, which is a great way of expanding that vocab of yours.

So now here’s the question: Is it worth it? It’s $US259 worth of gadget, plus the cost of books. As many detractors have said before, that initial cost is worth a lot of books. And the whole “convenience of carrying 1500 books with you” thing isn’t really practical, as much as it’s cool.

But here are my thoughts – comparing the Kindle to an iPod is a bit misleading. If you think about it, listening to music has always required some kind of device to play the music back, whereas reading has only ever required a book. So the simple truth is that there’s no need to own a Kindle. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t. It’s a well-built, easy to use and convenient device that can offer an immense level of satisfaction. Because of the size, and weight (or lack thereof), you can carry the Kindle with you everywhere, and read little by little much easier than carrying a book and having to bookmark the page when you stop. In the past week, I’ve read more than I have in a while – even reading several books concurrently, something I’ve never ever done.

So while it’s not a necessary purchase for booklovers, it’s certainly a good one, especially for the geeks among us.

[Kindle on Giz]

Let’s first look at the BeBook Mini’s better qualities. It runs e-ink. Nice. It’s easier to read than a backlit screen, though you can’t read it in the dark, but seeing how readers of books have been getting around this problem for centuries, we’ll count it as no biggie. Besides, e-ink is readable in sunlight. Backlit screens not so much.

It’s compact. More so than the Kindle. I could find a space for it in my overnight bag where the Kindle would not have fit. The Mini’s dimensions are 150 x 105mm. The 8-level greyscale screen is five inches (125mm, diagonal). The Kindle’s dimensions are 203 x 135mm with a 6-inch screen.

The Mini has an SD slot for memory expansion so together with a standard USB port, that makes two ways to get stuff into the Mini. Supported file formats run to ePub, PDF, doc, html, bmp, jpg, png, gif, tif, djvu, fb2, wol, txt, ppt, pdb, lit*, chm, rar, zip, mp3, mobi*, prc*, htm and mbp. (*=non DRM). It’ll also do text-to-speech for popular file formats, although the cyberbabe voice could take some lessons in diction from the talking GPS girl.

There are 10 numbered buttons underneath the screen, five of which have a second function. Menu mining is a matter of point by numbers. Page navigation has three methods. The left/right buttons on the left side of the screen, the 9 and 0 buttons underneath the screen, and the toggle on the right side of the device, which is the best method for flipping pages. Battery life is excellent. I had it on for days at a time and read hundreds of pages and the battery meter barely dipped down to the 25 per cent mark.

You can see from the picture there are two other buttons on the left of the number pad underneath the screen. The bent arrow takes you backwards, the menu button on the right of it pops up an options menu for the current page.

Expected features are here. Bookmarking, three-level page zooming, go to page, etc. The BeBook will connect to Mac or PC and mount as a USB drive. It has 512MB flash memory. But adding new books is not nearly the seamless process it is with the Kindle 2’s 3G-based downloads. You can download 20,000 classic book titles, all of them free, from the BeBook web site but new releases require you find a place to buy them.

And where would that be? BeBook’s site has a bunch of links to commercial ebook sellers but none of the links work. I tried Barnes & Noble but this leading seller requires a credit card with a US billing address. Oh. Google search? Yeah, sure, that turns up sites to get content from. But, well…it’s all a bit hard, really, except, I suppose, for those early ebook adopters who with their healthy bookmark folder full of places to buy know exactly where to go. And speaking of hard, the Mini has a search function but entering text via the number buttons is a pain.

In use, the menus and navigation took little effort to get used to, but compared to the Kindle’s elegant control layout and keyboard, the BeBook Mini looks a bit primitive.

But the crunch factor is the price. And this is going to hurt the BeBook, which is priced at $389. The Kindle is expected in Australia at about the $300 mark. A bit less for quite a bit more, including the Kindle’s killer feature of content updates and purchasing over 3G, which as I saw the other night works in Australia via an AT&T roaming partner.

(You can get more info on AT&T’s roaming arrangement with international partners over at Fierce Wireless.)

When you consider the competition growing in the e-reader market, which Gizmodo’s Dan Nosowitz has well summarised here, the BeBook looks a bit lacklustre. By itself, not a bad device. But out on the playing field, it’s gonna find the Kindle 2 and other products a bit hard to contend with, both on features and price.

That said, the BeBook may find itself a niche among those who have for years been reading books on a smaller device such as a Palm and don’t need lots of whiz-bang features, but do lust after a simple device with a bigger screen. They may also like the fact it’s not tied into any single online reseller. It can be ordered online from the BeBook Australia web site.

To be clear, this is the same device we saw before—a smallish (19.6 x 12.4 x 1.3cm, it turns out) e-reader with two screens, a 6-inch E ink display up top for displaying book text, and a 3.5-inch touchscreen LCD down below for navigation.

Connectivity comes by way of free AT&T 3G as well as 802.11 b/g Wi-Fi, while storage duties fall to the 2GB of internal memory, as well as a microSD expansion slot. Barnes & Noble claims charge time of 3.5 hours—by microUSB, thankfully—which’ll let you read for “up to ten days,” which is a curiously indirect way of describing battery life, and doesn’t really say much about what “reading” means. With constant LCD use? Occasional? None? Audio playback seems limited to MP3s, with a 3.5mm headphones jack taking care of output. Say what you will about the design, but you can’t fault B&N on ports.

Naturally, the main content source is the B&N ebook store, which has a reasonable—though not spectacular—selection of magazines and newspapers too. What the Nook has that other B&N-compatible readers don’t, though, is sharing. As with Amazon’s Kindle iPhone app, the Barnes & Noble’s reader can be synced with the company’s various mobile apps. Even better is the user to user sharing, which sounds an awful lot like the Zune’s old “Squirting” feature, which let people sharing DRM-wrapped songs for a limited time. That said, the sharing terms are pretty generous:

Share favorite eBooks with your friends, family, or book club. Most eBooks can be lent for up to 14 days at a time. Just choose the book you want to share, then send it to your friend’s reader, cell phone, or computer.

Avid readers can easily plow through all kinds of books in 14 days, so this is a pretty sweet deal.

And in a deprecating nod to the Kindle’s notorious durability issues, Barnes & Noble is pushing extended warranties right out of the gate: a $70 protection plan stretches the stock warranty to two years, and throws in accidental damage coverage, meaning you don’t have to worry too much about pulling a Matt, which given that this thing has two freakin’ screens, is a very real worry.

So let’s just get this out of the way. “Hi, I’m Kate, and this is my Nook!” Ha. Ok!

Disregarding my inner 12-year-old for a second, the above video does give a better sense of how the reader’s control scheme works than words ever good, but I’ll give it a go anyway: the only hardware buttons you’ll really use are the right and left page switchers. The rest, from book library navigation to settings menus to book sharing, is managed through a separate menu system on the much more responsive (though from the looks of it, kinda jerky) colour LCD. One one hand it’s a clever workaround for E Ink’s horrendously slow refresh rate; on the other, it’s kind of hilarious. I mean, really? [B&N]

Preorders are live on B&N’s site, and units should hit mailboxes on November 30th.

UPDATE: Err, looks like B&N’s web guys jumped the gun a little bit, and they’ve pulled the site. But ha, not soon enough. Eyes, feast:

Features of the Nook include a wireless connection to download books from the retailer’s online e-bookstore and an e-paper display from E-Ink Corp. that is separate from the colour controls.

The only discrepancy we’ve found with our original story is that B&N was not priced lower than the Kindle, as our sources said it might be. It’s tied at $US259. But given the lending feature and colour screen, a price match may be more than enough to compete with.

They also reveal the name as “Nook”. It’s kind of dumb. [WSJ via Engadget]

All-in-One Media Tablet or E-Ink Book Reader(poll)

The PRS-300 will be available in red, black and silver and has a five inch display with 440MB of internal storage (no expandable memory card slots). The PRS-600 will also be available in the same colours, but will also have a larger six inch touchscreen display, audio output, and MS/SD card compatibility with 440mb of internal storage. No lighting or wireless is mentioned in either of the service manuals, but we are NOT opting that out as a feature at this time until we get some sort of confirmation.

So we’re not sure if it has the backlighting that Wilson hated so much in the PRS-700, but seeing as the model numbers are lower, we’re guessing that this will hit at somewhere below the $US400 price tag of Sony’s higher model. Especially since the Kindle 2 is now $300. [Sony Insider]

Matt Geise, the name behind the case, went out of his way to buy Amazon’s $US30 protective cover for his wife’s Kindle 2. Over time, the points where the cover attaches to the device with metal clips began cracking. As the cracks got more severe, so did the Kindle’s symptoms. Eventually, it totally croaked, as you can see above.

Geise went to Amazon, who told him to shell out $US200 for repairs—less than the cost of a new or used Kindle, but not by much. So, as you do nowadays, he turned to the internet, where he found people with similar stories. Then, as you also apparently do nowadays, he parlayed it into a $US5m class action lawsuit.

Fair enough, though I imagine Geise and Co. could have a tough time proving this is a design defect, and not just a symptom of rough treatment. Still, the Kindle’s already got a somewhat flimsy reputation for, um, flimsiness, and this news doesn’t help. Flexible displays can’t come soon enough. [Seattle Times via Fast Company]

[YouTube via CrunchGear]

The company that purchased E Ink is little-known (to me, anyway) Taiwanese company Prime View, which already assembles the parts produced by E Ink. We think 2010 might be a little optimistic for the actual production of colour e-ink, given what Amazon’s Jeff Bezos had to say on the matter, but it’d be nice to be wrong in this case. [Reuters]