Earthling,

As I've said in other posts - I have a PDA phone which cost me $200 with a 2-year contract. It's similar to a smartphone, but with a touchscreen and a Pocket PC OS. In addition to being a camera, phone, gps, car navigator, expense tracker, alarm clock, schedule keeper, billable time tracker, Internet hot spot, music and video player, weather oracle, email provider, chat room communicator, audio recorder, guitar tuner, and game player - it also lets me read books. I keep a ready-reference library on a 2 GB mini-SD card. Plant and animal identification, current copy of the California fishing regs, How to Tie Knots, the Chamber of Commerce web pages for the towns I'm passing through, star charts (actually a program), tide tables, historic maps of the area, etc..

Now the only feature that the Kindle has that is arguably better than my PDA is the large e-ink display. However, I'll take the portability and versatility of the PDA over the Kindle any day. The display isn't really that hard to read, especially if you buy the VGA screen version. I've read hundreds of books on this QVGA screen with no ill effects. Typeface and size are adjustable of course. And the Kindle doesn't fit in my pocket. <img src="/forums/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" /> You don't need to be an electronics guru to understand that.