I was on San Francisco State University’s campus this morning to give a talk when someone came up to me and wanted to see my Kindle. I’ve now shown it to dozens of people and the reactions are all pretty similar. I have started filming these reactions so you can see how people react when they first get their hands on it.

Why was I so harsh on it? Because of conversations just like this one.

Notice that she accidentally hits the “next” button. That she tries to use it as a touch screen. That she is bugged by the refresh rate. But, she, like me, is interested enough to want to buy one (she’s the first that I’ve shown it to that has that reaction). Imagine if Amazon had designed it better? Imagine how many more people would want it.

Oh, and Slashdot.org linked to my harsh review and, boy, did that bring a lot of haters to my chat room.

I’ve read two books on it, which explains why I haven’t been on Twitter very much in the past week. But the Kindle really bugs me now. I’m hitting all sorts of little things that the Kindle team simply didn’t think through very well.

Here’s my one-week review of Amazon’s Kindle.

I focus on a few areas:

1. No ability to buy paper goods from Amazon through Kindle.
2. Usability sucks. They didn’t think about how people would hold this device.
3. UI sucks. Menus? Did they hire some out-of-work Microsoft employees?
4. No ability to send electronic goods to anyone else. I know Mike Arrington has one. I wanted to send him a gift through this of Alan Greenspan’s new book. I couldn’t. That’s lame.
5. No social network. Why don’t I have a list of all my friends who also have Kindles and let them see what I’m reading?
6. No touch screen. The iPhone has taught everyone that I’ve shown this to that screens are meant to be touched. Yet we’re stuck with a silly navigation system because the screen isn’t touchable.

Would I buy it? Yes, but I’m a geek. I can’t really recommend this to other people yet. Sorry.

It’s obvious that they never had this device in their hands when they were designing it.

Whoever designed this should be fired and the team should start over.

I have so many people to be thankful for I can not do them all justice by trying to list them all here.

Our families are about to arrive. The turkey is smelling up the house. The Kindle and our new son, Milan, is being played with by Teresa, founder of Tango Diva, a site for women who travel.

Hope you’re having a great Thanksgiving (if you’re in the United States). If you’re not, back to work darn it!

Milan brings such joy to our lives. First Thanksgivings are so special. I wish Patrick were here too, then it’d be really over the top.

Last night I met Cathy Brooks. She’s helping plan the LeWeb3 conference. I trust her opinion and she’s whip smart.

I showed her the Amazon Kindle device and asked her which book should be my first book I read on it. She recommended “Basic Black” by Cathie Black. She has been on the executive teams for a lot of publishing efforts from USA Today to Oprah’s new, and highly successful, “O” magazine.

I did something that I’ve never been able to do before. I bought the book right in front of her.

When I got home I started reading — I got about halfway through the book. I can see why Cathy recommended this book. Lots of great lessons about business and stories about the publishing industry, something I’m interested in.

Anyway, this morning I did a little video comparison to “real” books. I compared it to Blue Planet Run, a photo book that Rick Smolan just sent me (he’s a famous photographer who we’ll have on Photowalking someday if we can match our schedules up).

Hopefully this will be the last of my Kindle posts. Onto other things.

Mike Arrington, founder of TechCrunch, and I were at an Orange party tonight. His Amazon Kindle didn’t show up yet (it comes tomorrow) so I showed it to him. He hated the UI, so I turned on my cell phone and recorded him goofing around a bit.

Etch a Sketch is better, huh? Yikes.

Oh, Mike’s always saying my videos are boring (although he admitted to me that he watches them). I wonder what he’ll say about my videos now that he’s been on one?

Oh #2 Ben Higginbotham of Technology Evangelist ACTUALLY HAS TWO SONY READERS and gives us his 12-hour video review of the Kindle and he disagrees with Mike, saying the navigation is “sexy cool.”

Here’s my first use of the Amazon Kindle. I buy TechCrunch. All at the beach, er Half Moon Bay Ritz.

Then I find out there’s a browser which actually is better than buying blogs. Ahh, too bad Mike, you won’t get my $.60! :-)

I bought the New York Times, too.

What was great was there’s no setup at all. It comes pre set up. Very cool. Jeff Bezos even said “welcome Robert.” Heheh.

I have another video coming soon where I walked around the neighborhood with it.

Oh, and Mike, thanks for giving us bloggers all a vacation! Just what we need to play more with our Kindle’s!

What’s really fun is that if you buy TechCrunch you don’t get the comments, but if you get the free version you get comments!

UPDATE: here’s my walk around the neighborhood while using the Kindle for the first time too. In my walk video you see what the screen is like in sunlight and shaded light.

Oh, and James Kendrick gives you his video first impressions too.

Photowalking with Thomas Hawk is grand, but today we have a real treat: a photowalk with a real professional photographer. Marc Silber. He even has the license plates to prove it! It’s long, but not boring. Just in case you don’t have the hour to spend Rocky made you a short and sweet editor’s choice for you.

Marc has written an eBook on how to take better photos, and we talk about some of the tips in the book. You’ll learn a lot on this hour walk. Plus you get to see some great scenery on a ridge above Palo Alto/Silicon Valley and hear some stories about the property because Marc used to live on the property, which is now a public park.

Oh, and I did almost the entire hour by walking backward. It’s a skill that only my parents would be proud of.

Thank you to Seagate for sponsoring my show and supporting digital photography through not only their storage devices but also by supporting my efforts to do educational photowalks like this.

On Friday I met one of the San Jose Mercury News’ photojournalists, Richard Hernandez. He’s worked there 13 years and showed me a project he’s worked on for the last few weeks. I shot this video with my cell phone, I’ll have a longer, more-professional interview up with both Richard and VuVox’s CEO up later this week.

This floored me as a way for photojournalists to cover news stories and other things in a new way.

What did Richard do? An interactive photocollage for today’s newspaper. Well, it’s not in the newspaper. But it goes along with an article that was done for the newspaper on one of Silicon Valley’s famous neighborhoods, Willow Glen.

This is the kind of stuff that bloggers rarely, if ever, do. It requires too much of an investment. Richard worked for a couple of weeks making images, collecting archive photos and videos and audio clips, and putting those together using VuVox’s new unreleased photo collage software. Richard used a pre-release version of the software to create this photo collage.

So, what is it? It’s a strip of photos. You drag it back and forth with your mouse. When you see an icon or a frame on top of one of the photos you can click and play the media that’s there. Sometimes it’ll be an audio story. Sometimes it’ll be another, more detailed, picture. Sometimes it’ll be a video.

I found myself mesmerized by the ability to tell a new kind of story.

Imagine going to a fire and taking an overall image and then laying on top of that video, audio, text (links to other stories) and having a much more complete photo story there.

Or, putting up a picture of a map where something happened and then linking audio and video off of that?

Or, for me, just a new way to show you my baby pictures?

Anyway, the longer video which shows how he built this will be up later this week. Richard also said he’d love to come along on a future photowalking and teach us a few things. Can’t wait!

Will this save photojournalism? Well, I imagine that this will draw new kinds of audiences to the Mercury News’ pages. Those audiences will stick around a long time (I’ve already spent 10 minutes playing around with it this morning, and I’m not even 1/8th of the way through it all). And they’ll be likely to click on advertising experiences (none are in Richard’s work, but he showed me how he could link off to Amazon, or other eCommerce sites and get an affiliate fee. Or, advertisers could just pay to have their brand included in the photo collage.

Nice to see the San Jose Mercury News is investing in new technology. I know they are having a rough time (Richard even hinted at it in the video when he joked he still has a job) but it’s things like this that will bring audiences back to newspaper brands and will give advertisers a new thing to engage with the Mercury News’ salespeople on.

Can’t wait to try it myself.

Friends of mine are already planning out their CES trips. Ryan Block at Engadget told me their planning is already well underway. I think they brought a dozen people last time, they always do the best coverage — in the BlogHaus we displayed their posts, along with tons of others from around the blogging world on screens there — I keep Engadget and Gizmodo loading on my cell phone so I always know what the best stuff is that’s happening at CES. Nice that this year Apple’s Macworld will happen a week later so Steve Jobs can’t take our attention away from the gadgets this year. Heh.

Anyway, Retrevo, the consumer electronics search engine folks, are already signed up with me to do a series of video shows from the show floor. Steve Broback and crew are planning a blogger party again. And Seagate/PodTech are hosting the CES BlogHaus again.

Speaking of BlogHaus, this year we’re going to have the same rocking bandwidth we had last year (Ben Higginbotham of Technology Evangelist said that we were a lifesaver last year because the Internet connection in their rooms wasn’t fast enough to get their videos up).

Also speaking of BlogHaus, this was a fun chance for me to run a little test and see which event service has more geeks on it.

I’d heard that more geeks were on Facebook than on other event sites, so I wanted to do a little test to check out that little theory.

Facebook BlogHaus vs. Upcoming.org BlogHaus.

So far Upcoming has WAY MORE geeks than Facebook does. And people wonder why I praise Upcoming.org so often…

Anyway, are you going to CES? Why don’t you join us in the BlogHaus?

So, I’m watching the Android video and talking with my friends who are developers. Man, I thought my videos were boring, this one takes the cake.

Steve Jobs does NOT have to worry about losing his job to the folks from Google.

I didn’t see ONE feature that will get normal people to switch from the iPhone. This comes across like something developers developed for other developers without thought of how they were going to build a movement.

How do we know this developer API is uninspired? They are bribing developers with $10 million in prize money.

Compare to the iPhone. Steve Jobs treats developers like crap. Doesn’t give them an SDK. Makes them hack the phones simply to load apps. And they create hundreds of apps anyway. Now, Apple is getting is act together. Early next year an SDK is coming. So now developers will have both sexy hardware, a sexy OS (under iPhone is OSX, an OS that’s been in wide use for years now), AND a well-thought-out SDK.

But, here’s why Android is getting received with a yawn from me:

1. It was released without a personal approach. When Steve Jobs brings out new stuff he does it in front of people. Not in a cold video (as much as I love video it doesn’t inspire the way sitting in an audience does and getting to put my own hands on it).
2. This stuff is still vaporware. No phones are available with it. At Microsoft I learned DO NOT TRUST THINGS THAT THEY WON’T SHOW ME WORKING. Remember Longhorn? Er, Vista? The first time I saw it was largely in a format like this — it looked cool but it wasn’t running anywhere and they wouldn’t let me play with the cool demos. I’ll never make that mistake again. If you want my support for your platform I need to be able to use it and show it to my friends.
3. The UI looks confused. Too many metaphors. One reason the iPhone does so well is because the UI is fairly consistent. Fun, even. How do I know this? My ex-wife hates technology and she bought one and loves it. I try to imagine her getting a Google Android phone and getting very frustrated with a mixture of drop-down menus, clicking metaphors, and touch metaphors. At some point she’ll give it back and go back to the iPhone, which only presents a touch metaphor.
4. No real “love” for developers. Heck, I don’t know of a single developer who has had his/her hands on Android. And all we get is this cold video that just doesn’t inspire me to believe in the future of the platform. I know Dave Winer didn’t feel the love from the Open Social “campfire” event, but at least there we heard from quite a few third-party developers. That made me believe in the platform because I knew that they had already gotten at least SOME third-party developers on board. Heck, remember Facebook? Go back and see when I got excited by Facebook. It was two weeks after the F8 platform announcement. Why then? Because I saw that iLike got six million users in two weeks and was staying up. So, that communicated two things to me: 1. that the platform attracted interesting developers. 2. that Facebook was well enough architected to stay up, even under pretty dramatic load. Android is a LONG way from demonstrating either of these things to the market.
5. Google needs to get atomic videos. On an announcement like this there shouldn’t have been one long video, but rather 50 small ones, each demonstrating a separate API. Developers today are busy. Fully employed. They want easy to understand instructions for how to integrate platform stuff into their stuff. It’s amazing that Google itself doesn’t understand how its own search engine works. If it did, they would see the advantage of creating lots of video, not just one (because then they would be more likely to get found for a variety of search terms, not just a few — it’s one reason I create at least a video every day and it’s paid off very well for me). I’m giving Vic Gundotra the same advice — his long Open Social “campfire video” should have been cut up into the atoms that made up that video. Sure, put the long complete video up too (the molecule) but cut it up. Yes, yes, I know, I don’t take my own advice but then I have an excuse: it costs money, er time, to edit video and I don’t have a lot of it. Google doesn’t have that excuse.
6. Google’s PR comes across as “only caring about big bangs.” Last week I was in the Open Social press conference. Everyone else in the room worked for a big-name media outlet. Business Week. Wall Street Journal. Los Angeles Times. CNET. Barrons. etc. etc. Even TechCrunch was relegated to a phone-based seat and wasn’t in the room. That tells me that Google’s PR doesn’t get the value of small people. In fact, if you were tracking the mentions of that press call you’d have seen my use of Twitter during it got mentioned many times on blogs. Google’s PR didn’t seem to even understand why Twitter was important. They also kept me from using my video camera during the press call (the only reason I got video is cause I carried a cell phone with me — they asked me to leave my professional camera out in the car). Compare that to presidential candidate John Edwards who let me film, even on his plane during “off times.” And he has a Twitter account too.
7. It looks too much like a poor copy of the iPhone. They didn’t talk about ONE thing that the iPhone doesn’t do. Where’s the car integration? Why didn’t they focus a LOT on GPS, or video creation, or something else the iPhone doesn’t do. Do we really want to spin a Google earth map? Really? That doesn’t turn me on. Showing me Kyte.tv working on this thing would turn me on — that’s something the iPhone doesn’t do. Showing me killer podcasting-creation features would turn me on. That’s something the iPhone doesn’t do well. Instead we get some video game that we all played 10 years ago. Yawn. OK, OK, I know Android plays Quake and the iPhone doesn’t. But, come on, we all know a game API is coming for the iPhone and is that really going to get a lot of people to buy Android?

Anyway, so far I’m disappointed in Android. Maybe they’ll get it together, but until then I’ll remember the Russian Government official’s cell phone. He’s running Windows Mobile. Why? Cause developers in his community are building stuff for it. I’ll keep checking in with him to see if Android has gotten any traction.

Are you sensing that Google is just not very good at technology evangelism? After all, look at how successful Google has been outside of search. It hasn’t really had a good home run that we can point to outside of that. I think that’s because Google is coming across as too arrogant, too interested in only “important developers and people,” and doesn’t understand how to pitch end users and developers at the same time (developers only really come after end users do anyway, look again at the iPhone).

But what do I know, I’m just a blogger, right?

UPDATE: Patrick, on TwitterGram, says “it looks like a ripoff of the iPhone.”

UPDATE2: other responses are rolling in from around the Internet. Engadget. GigaOm.