New toys - Amazon Kindle

I'd wanted an e-reader for a long while, I don't have the best of eyesight and the tightly set text of many modern book imprints had basically stopped me from reading. This also made e-paper an essential - other screens refresh themselves constantly and make reading a lot of text a chore. My other criteria was price, around £100 seemed fair to me.

So when Amazon advertised the new 2010 Kindle at price points of £109 (wifi only) and £149 (including 3G mobile data facilities) I literally pre-ordered mine on the day. As I have no need to download books on the move I saved my money and ordered the wifi only model. Both share a 6" screen, 4GB of memory and the same form factor.

It arrived on time, was unpacked and powered up. It had a protective sheet of adhesive plastic with some warnings about use printed on it.. soon removed.. and.... it wasn't printed, it was text on the Kindle screen. Text of quite amazing clarity and quality. It's not like text in a book, it's far better, like a very high quality print on very high quality paper. I worked out the DPI of the 16-shade grey-scale screen and it's just about twice that of the monitor I'm using now. Impressive stuff.

It is, of course, monochrome. That doesn't worry me, this device is for reading text and for that you don't need colour. While we're about it, it's not touch-screen either - everyone who has handled my machine has tried to touch it. Sorry, but not at this price-point. Not yet.

Whilst you can find e-books to read all over the web, the Kindle Marketplace on Amazon is your central site to buy Kindle books, newspapers, magazines and blogs. You can buy a book either on your Kindle or via your PC browser. It's all very very streamlined - buy on the browser and next time you turn on your Kindle it's downloaded and you can read in a few seconds. I should note that there are many free books on the Marketplace, mainly older texts but very welcome indeed.

Reading itself is a pleasure. Large buttons on the side of the device offer page forward and back (on both sides to cater for lefties and righties alike). You can select sections, bookmark them, make annotations (using the excellent keyboard at the bottom of the device), select words and look them up in a dictionary, send quotes to Facebook or Twitter and generally do anything you could do with a book and so much more.

The tricks don't quite end there either. Hit a key combination and your Kindle will start reading back your book for you. Okay the Stephen Hawking voice will never be as good as hearing a well spoken audio-book, but it's a cool feature nonetheless. In addition you can play MP3s and there's even a basic Web browser available which works reasonably well.

The Kindle is a quite excellent machine. I can't compare it with other e-readers, having never used one, but this device does everything I'd expect from an e-reader and a lot more I didn't. It's a well-made machine and makes reading easy. Using one text size above default I find reading books is once again available to me - and that's worth a lot.

A condom for the iPhone?

Is this some kind of metaphor for our times? Has the hand-held device finally come of age? I doubt it but Steve Job wants to put your iPhone4 in a big rubber johnny. I don't know if Durex have been approached, or if the sheaths will feature different flavours, but I'm fairly sure a spermicide of some nature is involved. At least, users are unlikely to breed.

The obvious question is this: is the dobber designed to keep out malicious viruses or to keep in the foul evil mind-sperm of the user? As it spurts out of their Facebook, Twitter, Bebo, MySpace apps (and blogs) and floods the 'net with it's unwanted muck, maybe, just maybe it's a good idea.

Message jism. Information come. It soaks every area of the 'net. From dull Tweets to duller blogs, word after word, page after page of self-important turdery not another being on the planet is interested in. Not even your mum.

So why don't you just shut the fuck up. Stop your Facebook crap, I don't give a shit about your life. Just keep to leaving appreciate comments about mine. Who cares what your favourite music is on your Spotify list, just go to mine, it's much better. Write your blog? No, just come here, it's all you need.