For a non-Kindle owner, playing with the Guardian's new app on Monday was something of an eye-opener. The Guardian's first Kindle app has been six months in development ("We wanted it to be the best possible newspaper experience on the Kindle, and we wanted to get it right," said the team) and in keeping with other Guardian mobile products has made an effort to observe the best of other apps and build on those.
You have to put a lot aside to enjoy a Kindle. There's something more than a little paradoxical about reading the contents of a printed newspaper that updates once each day on an internet-connected mobile device.
Photo by kodomuton Flickr. Some rights reserved
Emily Bell, formerly of this parish, once observed that reading devices would be most useful for people with very heavy, bulky reading material – such as law students – who would really benefit from the efficiency of the digital format. Newspapers, however, aren't really that bulky, unless you're a news junkie and buy a stack of them.
And any smartphone user, myself included, would be forgiven for instinctively padding uselessly about on the satisfyingly matt screen. To borrow Caitlin Moran's capitals, NOTHING HAPPENS.
Taking all that into account, the Guardian app, along with all the other newspaper apps on Kindle, feels like it is designed for Kindle natives – people who are there primarily for books and might try out some newspapers on the side. Certainly the syncing process is pretty seamless, provided your connection is good, and apps now form one small part of a many-pronged strategy for ailing news organisations.
But it is a peculiar device. For the uninitiated Kindler, this device is all about the screen. It manages to be calm and alluring, yet the whole Kindle thing feels oddly out of date. My colleague Dan Catt described it beautifully as "a highly polished trilobite fossil" – like an early prototype for something that still has a long way to travel.
That said, lifting the design of the Guardian's Kindle app by introducing plenty of images is a good move, though anything on the Kindle screen still looks frumpy next to the nicely design Nook, for example. On the matt and monochrome (well, actually 16 shades of grey) screen, illustrations and photos have the curious quality of a delicate pencil study that comes from the softness of electronic ink, which has no backlighting. Backlighting, like all screens, makes photographs luminous and addictive, but is also hard work for our eyes and that makes the Kindle 'light relief'. So yes, it truly is a device designed for reading, which is very good. It's everything around the reading that needs work.
Browsing articles is straightforward enough, but I crave a bigger screen and less plastic, something that might reinforce the newspaperness, the tactility, of a compelling reading experience. Colour will come eventually, but will arguably add far less than the tactility of a touchscreen interface which, for a device all about the reading experience, will make a vast difference. That will be the Kindle, and possibly the associated newspaper apps, worth holding out for. Perhaps they will even, you know, update with breaking news, like an internet-connected device.
