After reading Why The Kindle Will Fail over at the Neiman Journalism Lab (yay new find) I came up with my own conclusion: it’s butt ugly!
I admit I got excited when the Kindle (version 1) first came out. Yay! I can have hundreds of books with me all the time! But then I took a look at it, and, being a lifelong Apple form factor girl, I couldn’t pull the trigger. The screen was smallish. The body was clunky. The interface was non-intuitive for pete’s sake. It’s like an engineer designed it. OoopS!! (from working in software for umpteen million years you learn a lot of engineer-designed software and products slip out because management doesn’t want to invest in usability testing- big mistake!). I thought, I can be patient, we’re still in early adopter mode. I could wait for the sleek, sexxy, intuitive Kindle version 2 i KNEW they were secretly working on. I had hoped Kindle would take a page from the Apple iPhone design book and make it touch-screen sensitive, and gestural to turn pages. But, my hopes were dashed when the Kindle 2 came out.

Kindle 2