My inner geek is telling me I need a Kindle. Even before the newer and cheaper models I’ve always been drawn towards a Kindle which is strange because I don’t read books, period!

I have an iPad 2 and several eBooks on that in both iBooks and Kindle app format. I’ve started to read books and then lost interest or been distracted by push alerts for a game of Words with Friends of Twitter alerts. That’s one of my issues with the iPad as a reading device, it’s far too easy to get distracted. I should really turn on AirPlane mode if I want to sit down and seriously read a book on the iPad but I just can’t bring myself to do that and I don’t know why.
Reflections and glare have always been my biggest gripe about the iPad and iPad 2, so much so that I recently bought and fitted an anti-glare matte film to my iPad 2 and I’m kicking myself for not doing it sooner, I won’t go into the details but you can read more about that here.Then there is the big issue of readability/legability of books on the iPad screen. I’ve played with Kindles a fair bit and they hands-down beat the iPad in terms of having a natural book-esque quality to the screen and words. The e-ink almost perfectly mirrors a printed page and when I first saw an e-ink screen in a shop I thought it was a dummy display model until the page changed. e-Books were made to be read on an e-ink display like that found in the Kindle, it’s easier on the eye and there are no problems with glare or reflections.

The early Kindle’s suffered from slow page transitions but from what I can tell this is no longer the case on the newer Kindles. Like a real book there’s no illumination for the screen, no backlight at all, so if you want to read in low light in bed you’ll still need your bedside light on. That doesn’t bother me too much but it would be nice if they could make some kind of low power illumination similar to that used in kameleon remotes or the very old Psion Series 5mx palmtop I used to own.

I’d also be a little less precious about a Kindle I think, I don’t know if I’d buy a Kindle cover for it or not, the screens seem pretty robust even if the main unit itself is quite light and feels like cheap plastic. Having tried a variety of different iPad cases I’m sure I could find some Kindle covers I like.

At present I subscribe to a lot of magazines with Zinio and read them when I get chance. These wouldn’t port well to the Kindle’s black and white screen and colour is a must so I’m going to continue reading them on my iPad. However, I’m now teetering on the point of buying a Kindle to try and get me into the habit of taking time out from my busy tech life, leaving my iPhone, iPad 2, MacBook Air and other gizmos in the other room and sitting down to read a good book. I doubt I’d use a Kindle as much as some of my friends who rattle through one if not two books a week, I wish I had that much spare time on my hands but I don’t but I’d certainly like to get into the habit of reading a book a month at least.

My other draw towards getting a Kindle is to see how they cope with PDFs. In work my employees have dozens of technical engineering journals to read every week, they used to be delivered as hard copies in the post but almost all have now converted to issuing PDF only copies of their technical journals. This isn’t a problem for me on the iPad 2 but none of my staff have iPads and I’m not likely to buy them all one any time soon. I have toyed with the idea of buying an office Kindle or two that they could load their PDFs onto and take home to read at nights/weekends but when I last looked into this, the early Kindle’s didn’t handle PDFs very well at all. From what I can gather now though, the latest Kindle have native PDF support and it’s simply a case of drag-n-drop your files via USB.

I have watched several YouTube videos that say in practice PDF viewing on a Kindle should be simple but in practice it’s not. Since the PDFs are not in kindle format you can’t mess around with font styles, font sizes etc and many PDF documents we have are published with text in columns across the page. The Kindle doesn’t appear to have a mode to extract that text to read in a flat page so you end up constantly panning around the page which isn’t very natural or efficient.

Long story short, I’ll still probably buy one of the new Kindles for experimentation and to see if it helps get me into the habit of reading books on a regular basis. Watch this space.

It was proving pretty tricky to photograph so I resorted to my trusty Veho USB Microscope
to get a video and some photos at the end of the post.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

You can press along the top and this gap flexes in and out but it’s resting position is with a gap probably just less than 1mm. This might not sound like much and you may not notice it initially, especially on the black iPad 2′s but on the white ones, once this gap starts to gather some dust and dirt it really starts to become noticeable.

I made an appointment at the local Genius Bar and showed them the problem, on the way through the store I stopped and checked all 16 or so iPad 2 they had on display and none of them had this issue. The genius at first wasn’t sure so he sought a second opinion and the 2nd Genius straight away said “that’s not right, I wouldn’t be happy with it if it was my iPad” so they agreed to swap it out for a new one. Even though they were out of stock for sale iPad 2′s, they have a separate stock for exchanges and repairs and luckily for me they had one white 64GB white one.

He brought the new one out, passed it to me in the cellophane wrap to double check the new one whilst he started doing the paper work. Unfortunately the replacement one he handed me to inspect had an even bigger gap just under neath the headphone socket but only about 1 inch long unlike the one I took back which had a 5-6 inch long gap.

The genius seemed a little surprised too and went out the back for quite a while, eventually he came back and said since I rejected that one and they had no others in he’d have to order me one, so I’m waiting for a call to let me know when they’ve got it in.

Some of you may think I’m being a little fussy here, but let’s just remember how proud Apple were of the tight fit and finish and tolerances of the iPhone 4 bezel and metal surround (even if it did have a few holding-it-wrong issues) and let’s also not forget this isn’t some £100 palm-pilot from the 90′s, this is a £700 tablet (including the smart cover which of all the iPad 2 accessories is the only thing I’ve bought so far) and if I’m parting with £700 for something it needs to be 100% right.

UPDATE 26th April 2011: I had a call from Apple to say that the replacement iPad 2 they had ordered was in store. I tried calling to ask them to inspect it before I drove for an hour to the store but their stupid phone system auto-hangs up every time so I had to make the drive. I checked the new unit and whilst there were no gaps around the bezel, the left hand side aluminium was badly scratched (where the smart cover connects). I asked if it was a refurb unit to which they said no, I pointed out the marks and said I’m rejecting this one too and he took it out the back for 5 minutes and came back out with a brand new sealed retail unit. They apologised for messing me around and gave me the brand new retail unit which upon inspection seems perfect. So as far as quality control and build quality go for the new iPad 2, it’s not looking good, I rejected 3 out of 4 units!

1 – REJECTED my original one as seen in the photos and videos with a long gap across the top

2 – REJECTED the first replacement offered to me with a smaller but wider gap under the headphone socket

3 – REJECTED the second replacement offered to me a week later with no gaps but badly damaged down the left hand side

4 – ACCEPTED the new retail unit they opened for me, no marks, scratches or gaps…since getting it home I’ve noticed some light bleed around the edges but can’t be bothered going back to the store again just yet.

There are only 3 official sources for the iPhone 3G in the UK:

1 – Apple
2 – Carphone Warehouse (CPW)
3 – O2

If you are an existing iPhone owner and wish to upgrade you cannot go to an Apple store! All upgrades for current iPhone users have to be done through Carphone Warehouse or O2.

The problem is, Apple have so far not given any stock of the White iPhone 3G to either O2 or CPW. This effectively means that existing iPhone users cannot upgrade to the White iPhone 3G and must, for now at least, settle for the black version.

I’ve made near daily visits and several phone calls to both O2 and Carphone Warehouse trying to confirm a date that they’ll be receiving stock of the White iPhone 3G so that I can upgrade and some of the responses I’ve been getting are shocking:

“oh no sir, there’s no white iPhone only black, you must be confusing it with the iPods?”

“the White iPhone is going to be exclusive to the Carphone Warehouse, O2 won’t have any”

“the White iPhone is going to be for Pay As You Go customers only”

“The White iPhone will launch between October and December along with the PAYG version”

For Pay As You Go customers only!! Don’t talk rubbish, why would a PAYG customer (who’s going to be paying well over the odds for the phone in the first place) be restricted to getting the White one, which is 16GB only? Christmas time? Really? The Apple store has plenty of them in right now.

There have been a few people who decided they didn’t want to wait and purchased a White iPhone 3G in the Apple stores (who have plenty) and signed up to a new O2 contract in store. When they got home they just called O2 and played *dumb* pretending they thought that was the way they were supposed to upgrade and had their original contract moved over and the new contract just signed in store cancelled. This is risky though, if O2 don’t take pity on you or think you’re trying to pull a fast one they could leave you stuck with 2 simultaneous iPhone contracts!

I’m the kind of person who would have normally tried doing the above *playing dumb* trick by now but unfortunately it’s not that straight forward for me. I need to simultaneously upgrade my existing iPhone and migrate from a personal to the newly available business tarriffs. I also need to do the same for one of my employees and migrate us both to the same shared business plan and then migrate two current O2 Nokia users to the same shared iPhone tariff but using the two superseeded original iPhones…and as luck would have it, all this is possible but only at an O2 store who don’t have White iPhones.

If you happen to know of any O2 stores that have White iPhones in stock please do leave a comment below and put me out of my misery.

UPDATE (23rd August 2008): Good news, existing iPhone owners can now officially upgrade to the white iPhone 3G at any Carphone Warhouse or O2 store (stock levels permitting). I walked by both CPW and O2 stores today and saw signs advertising white iPhones now in stock. Half an hour later and I’m walking out the door with a white iPhone 3G. I asked when they had stock of the white ones and they said yesterday (22nd August) so if you’ve been waiting, go get one, the white is DEFINITELY better than the black in my opinion as it doesn’t show up any finger marks or scratches on the back!