Amazon’s KINDLE: butt-ugly

Disappointing design in Amazon's Kindle.

    I’ve been waiting for a good e-book for years.  I love books but as I’ve stated in a previous post, best sellers are use-and-throw-away items in my mind and to have them in e-format would be great.  What a handy way to take along three of four good reads when you travel and save a tree to boot.  You can also imagine students finally losing the heavy book-bags and having a whole year’s textbooks on one e-book; I still have back pain from carting around my gigantic medical texts for four years.

     So, I was excited when Amazon’s Jeff Bezos finally unveiled the KINDLE this week.   The device uses E Ink®, a technology that mimics the appearance of ink on paper to a remarkable degree.  The display is not backlit allowing text to be read as easily outdoors as indoors.  The device is wireless and the fee per downloaded book is $9.99 (See Amazon for further details.)
    However, my excitement was short-lived.  The KINDLE is butt-ugly!  I mean what-were-they-thinking ugly!  Off-white and asymmetrical, the KINDLE looks like it belongs in the ‘70s.  This is the missing link in industrial design, the dodo of the gadget world.  KINDLE is so ugly it even makes a ZUNE look good.  Gregg Zehr, the guy who headed the design team for KINDLE needs to find another career.  Hasn’t he been paying attention to what Jonathan Ive has been doing for Apple? Touch-screen controls are here, scroll-wheels are out; smooth surfaces with soft rounded edges are cool, sharp angular contours and asymmetrical shapes are not.  Off-white?!  I kid you not, it looks to me like the designer tried to reproduce the look and feel of the Texas Instruments SR-10 (see photo), a calculator that came out in 1973. WTF!
    Jeff Bezos may arguably be the most successful Internet retailer around but he seems to know squat about industrial design.  Very disappointing.  However, there are, I gather, quite a number of other e-books in the works and one can only hope that Jonathan Ive has his hand in one of them.

Joseph Froncioni

Comments

[Christian Louboutin]

I gather, quite a number of other e-books in the works and one can only hope that Jonathan Ive has his hand in one of them.