Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos has created a piece of technology that's awesome but ugly:

The Kindle, launched Monday, is a slim handheld device that holds around 200 novels' worth of words and--using electronic ink technology that physically arranges a dark chemical under the screen--displays them so crisply that the text is only barely distinguishable from ink on a page. Unlike the Sony Reader, a device launched about a year ago that uses the same e-ink display technology, the Kindle connects to Amazon's servers with an EVDO cellular connection to download books from a stock of more than 90,000 _title_s, and can pull an entire novel's text directly onto the device wirelessly in less than a minute.

The Kindle does a remarkable job of reproducing the feel of a book. The passive display technology produces no light, so a two-hour charge of its battery lasts for 30 hours of reading.

The goal, says Bezos, was to create a device that "disappears completely and lets you enter the author's world."

But from a design perspective (and my perspective!) the sooner the Kindle is updated the better. Amazon's reader is in many ways the anti-iPhone. It does one thing very well: downloading and displaying text. Unlike Steve Jobs' wondertoy, it's ugly.

The Kindle is an off-white, asymmetrical tablet. Its screen is entirely gray-scale and never gets brighter than a dingy gray; images look as if they were printed in a Depression-era newspaper. Menus are navigated with a clunky up-and-down click-wheel, and when they load, the screen flashes black like a TI-82 calculator.

Anyway, check it out here.

www.engadget.com/2006/09/11/amazon-kindle-meet-amazons-e-book-reader/

It's an old _link_, but the product finally launched this week!

Prototypes often lack the final "fit and finish" of a cool industrial design with top-notch materials, colors and styling, and there's surely a separate team working on how to make this product look sexy. When they put it all together you'll likely see something that makes your privates hum.