Although not hugely loved by the UK public, mainly for the way it forces people to pay for free content, the new eBook from Amazon has sold out within hours of going on sale. With a sale price of £194 ($400), some think it is far too high for what essentially is a digital screen that you can read books on.

The device doesn’t support PDF format, has a lowly 256mb internal storage, a 6inch display, so why on earth would you buy this over a Laptop?

Functional Design
The Kindle, which is larger than the average paperback book but not as thick, won’t wow anyone with eye-catching good looks. It’s a boxy rectangle of white plastic with a matte finish (though it comes with a leather cover). A 6-inch electronic-paper display from E Ink covers the top portion of the device; a keyboard dominates the bottom quarter.

The keyboard, with its rectangular keys set mostly at an angle, is easy to use. A rubberized surface on the back of the device makes it comfortable to grasp.

The Kindle supports up to 2GB SD Cards, but unfortunately the slot is located beneath the removable back plate and is not readily accessible.

What caught my attention, though, is Amazon’s attention to detail in other respects. The unit’s thickness tapers from left to right, making it easy to hold. The taper dovetails with the angled Next Page button that runs the full length of the display along the right side; the rocker-style design makes moving forward a page easy, no matter where your hand is holding the device. This is an important detail if you’re reading a long novel, since poor design leads to muscle fatigue.

The other navigation buttons are conveniently situated around the display. The Previous Page button runs down two-thirds of the screen on the left side, while a second Next Page button takes up the lower third (this arrangement is useful for lefties and righties alike who want to mix up their repetitive page-turning motions). Beneath the Previous Page button is a small Back button and a rubberized scroll wheel.

Logical Layout
The Kindle’s design is finger-friendly; the buttons flowed logically as I navigated the device. I also liked the scroll bar/select wheel combination, whereby you scroll to menu options by using the wheel, and then push the wheel in to select options.

You can also push the wheel in to call up a context-sensitive pop-up menu. For example, when you’re shopping in the Amazon store, the menu offers to take you to Home, the Kindle store, Top Sellers, New & Noteworthy, Recommended for You, and ‘Save for Later’ items. I particularly liked that last option: I could pick things I stumbled on in the course of browsing, and bookmark them to find them again before proceeding with another purchase.

When you’re at the Kindle’s Home screen, the pop-up menu offers to send you to the Kindle store, check for new items, change the device settings, and manage content, moving items from the Kindle’s 180MB of user-accessible memory to an SD Card and back again.

This menu also offers “experimental prototypes” that include a basic, text-friendly Web browser and a background MP3-music player. Curiously, Amazon presented the latter at launch as a feature, not a prototype.

While reading, you can use the Kindle’s select wheel to highlight a passage or choose where to make an annotation. You can then e-mail a highlight to a friend or access your notes–stored as text files–via the Kindle’s USB connection.

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