Kindle 2, iPad 0

I woke up first thing this morning to take a drive to Erie, PA. I was going in search of notebooks for my Livescribe pen (if you don’t have one, you NEED one!) I had looked online for them, and they were out of stock on the Number 1 3-subject notebooks, which is the one I need, of course.

So, it was off to Erie, which is the closest city I can find a Target, Best Buy and Staples, which all sell the Livescribe pen and accessories. I was telling my sister last night that I was going, and my niece asked if she could go as well. I figured sure, it would save me from having to drive alone. So my niece and nephew both joined me on my little journey to Erie.

We stopped at Best Buy first, which had the Number 1 notebook, but not 2 through 8 (I will have to order those online, I guess), and also the number 1-4 one-subject notebooks.

But as we were in Best Buy, we looked around and they had 2 iPads sitting out as demo models. My niece played around with one, I played around with the other. My nephew wasn’t interested. He just wanted to play around with the video games. By the time we were done messing with the iPads and were ready to check out other items at the store, my niece and I both had decided that the iPad was a complete waste of money. She already has an iPod Touch, and had it with her.

Her question to me was: “Why would I spend $500 on an iPad, that is heavier and harder to carry around than my iPod, when my iPod already does all of this?”

My impression was that the iPad is a nice looking piece of electronica and that the iBook feature was nice. I liked the way the pages “flipped” with just a flick of the finger, but there was no way I was going to spend that much money for just one likeable feature.

We then looked at the Mac’s that were on display. She loved the Mac Book Pro, as do I, but I have to tell you, I have a pretty smart 15-year-old for a niece. She looked at the price ($2299) and then looked at me and said: “I could get two really good laptops from HP or Dell for that money!”

In fact, she could almost get 3, as we learned when we went over to the PC-based laptops. There was an HP laptop running Windows 7 for $749 that had a larger hard drive, more RAM and a number pad built in. It only had an AMD chip (which I will admit I know nothing about) so I couldn’t tell if it was actually faster or slower in the processing department. But, she was more impressed with that laptop than she was with the Mac Book Pro. “And I would still have money left over to buy a really cool bag to carry it in.”

After leaving Best Buy, we went to Target to see if they happened to have any other numbered notebooks for my pen. As we were walking into the electronics area, I noticed a Kindle sitting on a display. Of course, I had yet to see a Kindle first-hand, so I immediately went to it and started to play around. As my nephew again went off to play with the video game systems, my niece came over and watched me play with the Kindle. Here is the conversation we had:

Niece: What’s that?

Me: A Kindle.

Niece: What’s a Kindle?

Me: An e-book reader.

Niece: A what?

Me: An e-book reader. It allows you to read electronic versions of books. It holds like a thousand of them, and you can read them any time you want pretty much anywhere you want.

Niece: Really? A thousand books at once? Let me see that! (plays around with the Kindle) OH MY GOD! I can take notes on this thing?

Me: Yes. This way if you have to do a book report, you can write your notes right into the book to use later.

Niece: I want this! I need this! It would have been perfect when I had to read that book while in Florida! And it does pictures?

Me: Only in black & white.

Niece: SO?! The pictures in that book I read were in black & white! I love this! I’m telling mom it’s what I want for Christmas!

Keep in mind, this is a teenage girl we’re talking about here. They change their minds constantly, about anything and everything, but today she was more excited and impressed by the Kindle than she was by the iPad.

In all honesty, so was I. Sure, the Kindle only has a limited amount of uses when compared to the iPad. Sure, the Kindle looks a little “old-school” compared to the sleekness of the iPad. But the Kindle just resonated with me. Where the iPad made me feel like I was holding something that was too expensive to really handle, the Kindle just felt right. It wasn’t too big, it wasn’t too bulky, and I had a feeling that if I dropped it from the top of my desk onto a tiled classroom floor it would be just fine. The iPad, however, gave me the impression that if I dropped it I was going to end up with a broken screen and a useless piece of hardware.

If you would like more information about the Livescribe Pulse or Echo pens and their special notebooks, go to Livescribe.com or read about my first impressions of it in this post I wrote just after Christmas, 2009. It truly is a great pen for students, and I know of a few people who use it at work for meetings.