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Having recently reviewed the Amazon Kindle 2, I thought I’d explore some alternate uses for the e-reader.  Let’s face it, if the Kindle can do more for you than just being an e-reader, the price is a little more bearable.  The first alternate use I explored was blogging.

To begin, I did a quick search for online word processors, but the first few I came upon did not work on the Kindle’s web browser.  Out of desperation, I succumbed to writing the post as an e-mail to myself in GMail.  To conserve the Kindle’s battery I turned off the wireless once I had the GMail compose box up.  I was ready to write.

The Kindle keyboard is fairly comfortable to type on - I used the two-finger method with the Kindle lying flat on my desk.  I found my fingers moved pretty quickly across the keys, apparently, a bit too quickly.  The screen’s refresh rate could not keep up with my typing speed.  This was particularly frustrating when I needed to use the Symbol menu to insert an apostrophe, comma, etc.  I had to wait for the Kindle to catch up to my typing before it would display the Symbol menu.  The waiting involved watching the Kindle load up each character, one by one, at what felt like an excruciatingly slow pace.  I felt the same pain when I needed to go back and delete or add something. 

In the end, I spent over an hour typing up a post that normally would’ve taken twenty minutes.  The whole process left me frustrated, tired, and a bit disappointed.  I had really hoped my Kindle-blogging venture would be successful.  Unfortunately, I don’t think the e-reader is a viable blogging tool, at least not yet.  Maybe if you’re a really patient person or a slow typist, blogging on the Kindle might work for you, but this gal won’t be doing it again anytime soon.  Perhaps people will start making Kindle specific web services that will allow for more uses of the Kindle.