Underwhelmed.

I loved the damn thing, but it’s industrial design was… meh. The edges where too harsh.  It was bulky.  The big-ass buttons were too big ass.  Pages turned when I would rest the Kindle against my bag on the train and I’d lose my place.

It annoyed me.

But I loved feeding my reading habit and buying books on the train and just buying books to show off.  Plus, it was pretty cool to have the Wall Street Journal ready for me every day when I was ready for it.

Except, of course, that Wall Street Journal would not allow me to have web access to the paper unless I paid for that online access, as well.

I sold that Kindle a few weeks back, even though I loved it so.  To be honest, since I’ve been working on the book, my reading habit has dwindled severely.  Now I have a whole bunch of these presentation things I need to be working on (and I am), but I also have some spare time to get back into reading, so I was pretty happy to jump to the front of the line and place an order for a new Kindle as a first generation owner.

I got it last week, and the improvements are unreal.

Okay, they’re real. But they’re (almost) all the right ones!

No longer do you have to push a funky key combination to force the sleep mode. Instead, you flip the switch at the top–easy!  The buttons are smaller, and require a bit more impact and force (ie actual desire) to push, meaning you have substantially fewer accidental page turns!  This, naturally, makes me happy.

The pages, well, they turn quicker.  That makes me happy, too, except for the slight adjustment I’ve “learned” from when I push the page turn to when it turns… Ooops!  There’s that nifty little “read the words to me” feature, but it’s more to show it off than anything else.

I love that I can email my Kindle account PDFs or Documents and they’ll convert it for a dime and then I can read it at my leisure.  It’s annoying that it doesn’t keep images intact (I sent a PDF of The Book to it), but it’s nice to be able to read work, etc. documents NOT on the iPhone only.

In general, however, the industrial design rocks, the overall experience is greatly improved, the keyboard is better and the entire device just makes a lot more sense and seems about as right as it can be for an eReader, or whatever we’re calling them now.

The downsides that I currently see are:

No SD card for expansion of memory–but I never filled the last SD card, and Amazon will let you keep your digital books on their network, with the availability to pull them down whenever you want.  Not much of an issue from where I sit.

I still can’t print or grab snippets of text, send it somewhere and print it.  It’s minor, but it’s a pain in the butt to not be able to snag text, and article, etc. and print it off for reference.

This version did not come with a case like the previous version–I wasn’t a huge fan of the last case, but at least I had one and I didn’t pay extra for it.  In return, the package was a lot less, so I guess there’s some tiny bit of the environment that got saved, but I still had to shell out a bunch of bucks to get a neoprene case, which in turn required more packaging and shipping, so I think that ecological argument just got tossed right out the window into the smoggy air.  Just saying.

And it just got better…

Today, the Kindle iPhone application just came out, officially making Kindle hardware AND software, I think.  The application is free, and like all the other iPhone applications: select it, install it, use it.

I found all of my books in a place called “Archives”. I grabbed the most recent book I’ve been reading and it downloaded it to my iPhone.  In another tap, the book opened for me to read…

And this is where it got REALLY cool…

It opened up to the last page I read on my Kindle the day before.

No kidding!

While sitting in a doctor’s office this morning, I was flipping through pages–it was a thumb swipe from right-to-left–and I was able to exit the application and re-open to the same place.  A “refresh”-like looking button is on the screen, so I tapped it and in a few moments it let me know that I was at the furthest-most read page on any of my devices.

Pretty freaking cool, really.

Even cooler…

I didn’t have to “register a device” or make any limited number of devices “authorized” to use it, which is a hard lesson that our pals at Apple should start to learn–especially for those of us with iPods, iPhones, AppleTVs and more than one computer.

Kindle: I’m a fan. Thanks for listening and improving.  I hope the next changes are software changes so I don’t have to go through the sell-and-upgrade process again in a year.

In general, I think the answer is “yes”, but mostly, I have to wonder if the add-on to that is “but for how long?”.

I’m not going to pretend that organizations like the IAI (full disclosure: I am on the Board of Directors) and IxDA haven’t helped me, personally, make many of the social and professional connections that I have today.  But, that was before.

Before all this social network stuff sort of just asploded in our faces and made everything so intimate, public and NOW NOW NOW!!

I’m grateful for these organizations, actually, as long as they work.

So, to answer my questions, I’d say the answer on both parts is:  YES

But the time is critical for them, I fear.

BUT… I think both need to evolve a little in order to find the right way to keep it all under the same roof.  There’s no problem with people owning initiatives, and it’s awesome that people can, over the course of a holiday weekend (in the US, of course) crank out 110% awesome.  The world wants things RIGHT NOW, and that makes waiting even more difficult than Tom Petty ever imagined. Organizations love to talk about and hate their red tape and people love to talk about and love/hate their organizations response times and excuses of the red tape.

It kind of stinks. But, it’s also a reality.  There’s got to be a way to make things happen and get organizations and “their people” all engaged, enabled and empowered to “get stuff done” so they can meet in the middle. There’s got to be some sort of an open framework we can create where people start running as fast as they can and as fast as they want with great (or not great, half-cocked, hair-brained) ideas and make them work for both in a way where both reap the rewards.

I’ve watched as people have identified a number of reasons why events should be near them (and sadly, watched while even less than Pareto would be happy with identified themselves as those willing to take part in the preparation and organization of such things), griped and/or yelled and/or bullied about certain attitudes and approaches to different locations and even, I’m sad to say, as people have thrown up their arms and politely asked, urgently requested and all-out yelled and hollered their requests for assistance.

Unfortunately, I watched those requests get sent, and then watched forward motion get made without support.

In fact, over the course of a holiday weekend in the United States, I watched Steve Baty take his half-baked “UX Book Club” idea and start to bake the hell out of it with his peers–many he’s never met, and some he may never meet in his life.  Will Evans and Andrew Boyd jumped-in to help, without any real call for support and they helped inject more excitement and energy into the project.

They organized.

They plotted.

They schemed.

(Admittedly, I got involved, thumb-tapped away on my iPhone as furiously as I possibly could and tried to keep up from the remote reaches of the inner-midwest USA)

They found new ideas from their existing ideas.

They created new ideas–blew them up to bigger than better than any one of them had dreamed-up before.

Mountains were made out of idea molehills, and frankly the whole world looked a helluva lot better from a “wow, that’d be really kick @$$” perspective.

They used the hell out of the back-channel to get people active, excited and to make sure they were missing as few opportunities as possible while engaging as many people who could help them.

They did this without the assistance of associations, organizations, fax machines, the USPS or DHL delivery service.  The did this without worrying about whether or not the location was one that suited everyone.

They did this because they love what they do, they love being active and they have heart, soul and no real spare time to donate to their communities, but they figure they can give up an extra hour of sleep a night to make something worthwhile.

How come so few people want so much but can’t come up with the same type of inertia–if I tried to stop Steve right now, he’d plow through me like a Mack truck going over a puddle.  This thing is happening!

And it’s awesome.

But “they” own it. That is, there is no owner beyond this collective of unorganized people who decided that their locations could read books once a month.

They DO need the support of organizations–organizations can help them with (perceived?) purchasing power, greater reach, and the potential for more opportunities and growth beyond these local book clubs.

I mean, if someone has the gusto to pick up a book and read once a month, maybe they also want to sit down once a month and watch a presentation on <something> or they want to grab a beer with others and talk about <something> or they want to schedule their own “camp” type of thing.

They DO need organizations. As Marc Andreesen says (courtesy of Christina Wodtke), “Organizations are GREAT distribution channels.” (okay, so Christina clarified this below, but I think it still stands)

Hell, they’re a great place for like-minded people to get together and change the world, rattle the status quo and shake the foundation of just about anything they set their minds to.

Organizations DO need them-these people are THEIR leaders of TODAY and TOMORROW.

One can do without the other, however. One can create the other, however.

One SHOULD inspire, engage and activate the other.

My point is that I think a lot of us get frustrated–I know I have, and I do–and we forget that these things all really do have connecting points and dependencies.

Most of us work in the User Experience space (if you’re reading this blog, at least I think you are)–you/we should all be connecting these boxes and we should all be wanting to solve these problems. We should be taking advantage of this “whatever-point-oh” web/world that we’re in and FIND NEW WAYS to be excited and energized and CREATE SOMETHING BETTER.

Because if we don’t, someone else will.

Will you?

I will.

In the upcoming weeks–nay, days, I will be sharing my initiatives for 2009 as a member of the Board of Directors of the Information Architecture Institute. None of these are impossible to achieve and all of them are valuable and will be worth your time if you choose to participate and/or lead these initiatives with me.

I can’t do it alone, and I want your help.

And you can make my ideas better. More awesome. More YOU. Oh. My. God. Think of how cool that is to see a seed turn into a tree right in front of your eyes and/or from the work of your own hands!

There are so many opportunities for us–from having fun to getting really dorky-technical.

It’s there. If someone hasn’t thought of it–and even if they have–pick up the idea torch and give it a try.

There are big things to be accomplished in 2009, and there are all types of leaders needed–in organizations and in the world at large.  Organizations always need more leaders and volunteers and will present you with opportunities you’d never dreamt of.  If an organization cannot or will not support you, challenge them–better yet, challenge yourself–and start building something great, and present it to them.

Don’t just BE the change you want to see…

CREATE the change you want to see.

The Roku Netflix box is simple. It’s easy to set-up if you know how to, well, set things up. I’ve got a receiver that supports 2 additional zones in my house, and I run everything through it–the HD DVD, the SqueezeBox, the XM Stereo, the Cable TV and any random kids toy that we connect to the front of the receiver.

Picture-taking aside, it took me less than 2 minutes to get everything connected and ready to use. Your mileage may vary; I have 2 Cat6 connections behind my TV which made it easy to borrow from existing appliances to get this up and running.

To start, the Roku Netflix box has a small footprint. I have a SqueezeBox 3 and it is slightly larger than half the width of that, but shares similar dimensions of height and depth. The remote is incredibly simple–and the packaging came with the batteries needed to operate it. Call me crazy, but that’s one of my favorite “little” things companies can do and let’s me quickly get to the task of setting up the new toy

The Roku Netflix box offers you many different options for connecting to your television. There are Composite, HDMI, S-Video and even Optical Audio in addition to the Component connections–which is what I used since the cables were handy I just wanted to see this thing in action.

When I connected the Roku Netflix box to my receiver, the power supply and the Cat6 connection, I noticed something:

On the box, component connections were: yellow, red, white.
On the receiver, component connections: yellow, white, red.

Who’s right, who’s wrong? Why aren’t they the same? Just curious.

Keep in mind that this box does not currently support High Definition, but it has been mentioned that the ability to do so could be given via a software update.

The next thing I noticed was that there is NO POWER BUTTON.

Got that? The only way to turn this device off, as far as I can tell–and I did go through the user guide–is to unplug. That makes me a little nervous from a bandwidth perspective, but I assume that when the screensaver kicks in the device sort of sleeps and there are no worries. But still, I worry a little.

Now that everything was connected and powered up, I went through a pretty quick-and-easy couple of set-up screens. What was most odd was that, after I chose my connection type, the box went for a software update, updated itself, restarted and then re-asked me what my connection type was again.

I’m not sure I understand why settings were apparently reset/not retained, but the steps were simple enough that it’s probably a non-issue.

All of the rest of the connection verification steps were taken care of again and the box recognized that it was not registered as of yet and provided me with a code that was good for 30 minutes on the Netflix website. I assume that after 30 minutes I’d need to restart/refresh or it would do so for me.

Naturally, I went to the appropriate URL and registered the box.

The Roku Netflix box informed me it was all registered-up and ready to go and after a few moments of lading, it started displaying a carousel view of my Watch Instantly queue. Initially, the covers of the selections were blank, but in about a half minute the imagery started displaying.

Once I made my selection, the detail view was displayed:

This screen allows you to Play the selection, review the selection or remove the selection from your queue. Later, I found that if you have a series in your queue, you can browse through the individual episodes from this view, each showing a synopsis and also a progress bar if you started watching a particular episode.

Pretty sweet, really. I suspect it will be graphically enhanced in a future release as it is currently sort of plain, but works very well.

Kind of like me.

Once you play your selection, the Roku Netflix box displays the name of your selection and begins to “receiving” the video. The entire process of buffering takes about 30 seconds (YMMV) and also shows you your quality level, based upon your connection rate.

The next step is simple: your selection plays. Say hello to The Bacon Brothers: The No Food Jokes Tour Live 2003:

As I’ve continued spending an evening tinkering around with the Roku Netflix box (including giving “live” demos to @mtnfvr and @scubachris from twitter–track me down and I’ll do the same for you via iSight), there are nice things like the ability to fast forward and rewind at 3 variable speeds. The slowest speeds show you before and after “panels” of the live action to help give you context, whereas the faster versions only show you a rapid display of frames that are currently whizzing by. It’s still better than what happens on my Comcast OnDemand selections and it lets me easily continue where I left of watching (which Comcast does, but I’m just saying).

Overall, the quality is pretty good. It’s like watching a high quality, non-high definition signal (perhaps SD?). I notice some artifacts from time to time, but it also depends upon what you are watching. I noticed the artifacts more in a documentary than I do right now as I watch Sliders. There may be some slight quality shifts, but I’m also watching this on a 55″ television and streaming it over the internet. From my couch–not my desk–and getting fairly horizontal as I do it.

I’m okay with the sacrifice.

This was $100 well spent, for me. I have a pretty expansive library of movies and television series that I’m excited to catch up with. The biggest issue I have seen is that I went through my library on Netflix and maxxed out at 412 items–and I thought that they were all Watch Instantly items. At the moment, there are around 105 items in my Watch Instantly queue and going through the library again doesn’t feel to exciting.

This is easy. The controls are easy. It works as I expect it to, with a few added surprises that are pleasant.

I still have to manage my queue online, which is a slight pain, but I can endure that for this pleasure that I am getting.

If you’re a television and movie buff and you like to have background noise that you select when you’re doing some work or just feeling like you could spend a day on the couch watching Columbo, well, this is for you. It’s definitely for me.

Go buy it now.

There are more pictures and descriptions of the complete process available on my Flickr account.

====Update====

Dan Brown asked me this morning via Twitter (I’m @russu and so long as you’re not peddling SPAM, I’d surely welcome the follow) if I had tried to connect the Roku Netflix box via wireless.

I had not.

I am a bad, bad UX guy writing an Unbox Review, because I wrote it only from my perspective and given my own set-up and situation (which, to be frank, is why I built my darn house and wired it the way I did, but that’s not much of an excuse). Updated photos will be provided later today (Friday, June 6, 2008).

This morning, I switched from Wired to Wireless via the settings “tab”.

The Roku Netflix box scanned my local vicinity and found all of the available networks (which, by the way, whenever I find a “linksys” or “netgear” network out there, I laugh and almost have to connect to it and bittorrent my butt off, but, alas, I do not and my mp3 collection stays rather finite).

I selected the UserGlue network, well, since it was mine. An on-screen keyboard appeared so I could type in my password.

The strange thing here, to me, was that the keyboard was not QWERTY–it was 3 rows, alphabetical, A-Z. I did not think people still did this and had to wonder if there was any sort of user testing on this. Sure, it was pretty easy, but it wasn’t the keyboard I’m used to or that I look at several hours a day. My guess is that a lot of fellow geeks bought this device and not your relative neophyte, so again, more confusion.

I kind of did that Labrador Retriever head-cock thing, and if I could have, one of my ears would have flopped over in the middle to further emphasize the point.

But, this is a very limited sort of experience. In theory, I should not have to do this very often, so it’s not a major issue and it caused me no pain–just surprise.

The Roku Netflix box connected to my network and things were pretty much back to normal.

I went through the normal process of sifting through my queue and chose a movie. It seemed to me that the scenario was about 10 seconds longer than the normal retrieving/buffering activity, but that could have been a shift in perception from the night before. In fact, I’d wager that is what happened and that the timing wasn’t really (that) different.

The quality was the same.

Yes.

The same quality.

There’s not much more to say about that, except that the Roku Netflix box may now perhaps be even more awesome.

Awesomer?

Buy it, fellow geeks and nerds. Buy it.