Product Ugly

The release of the Amazon Kindle e-reader thing was a bit of a shock. Not because I wasn’t expecting it, but because for something that apparently took 3 years to develop and was scooped last year, no-one seemed to notice that the aesthetics are somewhat dodgy. It looks like something from the early 80’s – slightly too big and unwieldy, and all those angles seem to act against the kinds of affordance a device like that should be suggesting (“Hold me!”). It might be like the Fat Nano episode of course – in pictures it looked awful but once I’d seen and used one for real all was forgiven, but at the moment the Kindle just looks wrong to me. The keyboard looks difficult to use too – the bottom two rows of keys look difficult to get at with a thumb, even if you were holding the device with one hand while using the other to type. Jeff Bezos (Amazon’s founder) states that the most important thing about reading a book is that the book simply “disappears”, something they tried to emulate with the Kindle, but I’m not feeling it myself.

Actually while I’m at it, I’ll have a moan about the design of the new Sony PlayStationEye camera:

Quite why the microphone needed to be so much bigger, a different shape and plonked on the top of the lens like that is beyond me. Who’s going to want that next to their designer LCD TV? Not me, it’s living in a drawer under mine until I want to use it.

Thank God for Jonathan Ive, that’s all I can say…

Steven Carpenter : 20 Nov 2007 21:42 |  Tags: Art Media & Design |  Comments (3) |  Report a problem