Kindle vs iPad

Want an e-book but not sure which is better the Amazon Kindle or Apple’s iPad? A recent press release mentioned Amazon sold more electronic books than hardcover versions. The days of paper based books, newspapers and magazines are numbered as in even more interesting news Barnes and Noble put itself up for sale. I suspect traditional paper based reading materials will always exist, but quickly decrease in usage.  I have no doubt, in the next 5 – 10 years it will only be a minor part of overall book sales.

As I’ve mentioned in my bio, I’m a avid reader of books and all things related to finance online. I’ve owned an Amazon Kindle DX for over one year now, and loved using it to read books. I’ve been looking at the Apple iPad as something to not only read books with, but for a multitude of other tasks.  As of last week, I finally broke down and bought one. In case you’ve been living under a rock, it’s a tablet computer with no keyboard or mouse, and operates via finger touch. It’s the iPhone/iPod Touch bigger brother. This review will focus mainly on comparing to the Amazon Kindle, and using it’s as a reading device.

Apple iPad

The iPad is definitely a winner, and in many cases can replace a low end notebook or netbook.  Call me an Apple fanboy if you want. Yes I have a multitude of Apple products, but I’m someone who actively uses products from many other vendors. As someone who is a technologist, I like things that “just work”.  I’m for any tech that makes my life easier, not more complex. The Apple iPad fits this description perfectly. Often at night I would be sitting in my bed with my Macintosh portable reading blogs or other online articles.  For reading it’s great, and believe it or not the virtual keyboard is not bad. Granted I won’t be touch typing eighty words a minute essays, but input via the virtual keyboard works, and it’s effective.

The iPad is primary an output device (in plain English to read with), and it was well thought out for that purpose.  The large size is great to read newspapers, magazines or web pages.  I currently read the Wall Street Journal, and their iPad app is exactly the experience I would want to replace the paper edition.  When owning an iPad, you should have all of these apps installed:

• WSJ
• Bloomberg
• USAToday
• Financial Times Mobile Edition
• NPR
• Zinio
• Kindle (Amazon offers their reader software for multiple platforms)
• iBooks
• nook

For more details, see my post about the the ten best iPhone and iPad financial apps. For surfing the web, Apple’s Safari browser is great. If you already have a iPod Touch or iPhone, it operates the same way, except with a bigger screen real estate. This means reading personal finance blogs, forums or news sites is easy and quick. Pretty much every HTML based web page that works on your desktop will work on the iPad with one large exception. Adobe’s Flash is not supported on the iPad.  Based upon the heated debate between Apple and Adobe I suspect it will never ever come to fruition. Apple’s stance is pushing more for HTML 5 to support web video. As a techie, I agree with Apple’s claim about Flash’s performance problems. It has caused many headaches for me on many of my Windows or Macintosh computers.  I’ve always considered plugins like Flash as a hack to support multimedia types and loping old technology for web use. As a means around this either web sites will support HTML 5, or develop an app specifically for the iPad. In certain cases an iPad app will offer a much richer experience than a web based one, and suspect most news sites will offer an app for that.

Amazon Kindle

Amazon’s Kindle really is just a reader and only a single task device.  I suspect because of the heated competition with Apple, Amazon released two new models and lowered the pricing because of this.  Both devices are digital book readers.   The beauty of Amazon’s strategy is with it’s multi-device support.  It’s not only hardware you can purchase, but you can download and install software on a multitude of other devices:

• Google Android devices
• Apple’s iPad, iPod Touch and iPhone
• Macintosh OS X
• Microsoft Windows
• RIMM Blackberry

With it’s Wispersync technology, you can read on one device and pickup wherever you last left off reading your favorite book.

Which is Better?

iPad Pros

• Backlit -  Can be read in low or no light environment.
• Better user interface – The touching of the screen is much more intutitive than the Kindle
• Much better newspaper experience.  Formatting options are much better than the Kindle.
• A much multimedia rich experience (full color pictures and video)
• Can be used for other purposes – For example trading stocks via the E*Trade app.

Kindle Pros

• Easier to read – Can be read in direct sunlight and has a much higher resolution
• Longer batter life – With wireless disabled can be as long as 7 days (though Apple’s iPad 10+ hour battery life is pretty amazing)
• No additional fees for using Sprint’s wireless network – Allowing you to download from pretty much anywhere.  Not just from WiFi networks.
• More books available than iBooks  – If you have an iPad, installing Amazon’s Kindle app solves this issue.
• Almost instant on – Apple’s iPad takes approximately 10 seconds to start when off.

Subscriptions

I currently subscribe to the paper version of the Wall Street Journal, and to the Kindle version of Barron’s.  I plan on replacing both of these, and going electronic only with the iPad.  See my Barron’s iPad review.  The Kindle version of Barron’s, while not bad, you lose the experience when reading the paper edition. For now, I plan on canceling my Kindle version. Oddly enough you can only get magazine subscriptions on a Kindle device. Subscriptions are not available on third party Kindle readers. Instead I’m subscribing to Barron’s online (web) edition. It’s not only a better experience, but also cheaper than the Kindle edition. In addition, I get valuable insights when reading visitor comments. Sometimes much more than the original author. App developers take note, if the web site offers visitor comments, make them available within your iPad app. Unfortunately the WSJ app acts too much like it’s paper counterpart and currently does not allows viewing of reader comments.

Summary

The Kindle in it’s current form seems to be more suitable in reading books, and more specifically fiction. If you read technical books with lots of diagrams, you are better off using a iPad, as it seems to handle complex layouts better.  If you like to curl up to a great Harry Potter book, then the Kindle is your best bet.  In the end though, I suspect Apple will be the ultimate winner with it’s hardware. Since it’s multi-purpose, and does many things very well. If Apple uses the iPhone 4′s Retina Display technology (see resolution differences with iPad and Kindle), the gap in display differences will narrow significantly.

Amazon at the moment looks like they will be the ultimate winner in controlling the content, though Apple will win with the hardware.  From an investor’s standpoint, Apple surely has another great product on it’s hands, and I don’t think the 10 million iPad sales estimates are too far off.  Amazon I suspect will do better with content sales than Apple.  I think Amazon really has the content strategy part down pat.  Amazon in fact might be the ultimate investment winner if you compare ebooks to the razor-razorblade sales model.

Disclosure: Long Apple stock (AAPL)