If you know me or follow me on Twitter, you’ll be in no doubt that I own a Kindle 2. (Disclaimer: I love it, though I’ve detailed its shortcomings, especially in the UK, in numerous reviews for titles within Future. Also, affiliate links throughout.) I’ve shown it to many people, and they all ask the same handful of questions. Some ask other questions as well, but the following three almost always crop up within 20 seconds of holding one in your hand. The questions, and the context and implications behind them, are, I think, more interesting than the answers.

Does it do touch?
Damned iPhone. These days, everyone expects handheld devices to have touchscreens. Less than three years ago, despite touchscreen PDAs and some smartphones’ relative popularity with the alpha geeks, very few people would have asked that question at all, never mind as an initial reaction to a new piece of kit. People are disappointed when they learn that the Kindle doesn’t do touch, and that’s remarkable; how did we get from ‘no mainstream devices do touch’ to a position where people feel (not necessarily think) a device is technologically retarded if it uses buttons?

Some research has suggested that devices with touch interfaces create a stronger bond with their owners simply because of their inherent tactility – a geological instant separates an ancestor who would stroke its mate’s fur from a Hoxton metrosexual paging through his contacts by stroking his iPhone’s screen – but I am delighted that Amazon chose, even in the second (and third) iteration of its ereader, to shun touch. Not only does adding a touch substrate, as in the case of Sony’s touch-capable model, decrease the contrast of a screen already a bit muddy compared to an LCD, but the fact that the next/previous page paddles on the Kindle fall naturally under your thumbs as you’re reading means you don’t have to stretch a digit or involve your other hand just to swipe across the screen to turn the page. (Annotating and more general computing tasks are a different matter, perhaps, but for reading, the paddles are perfect.)

[Actual answer: no]

Is it colour?
Again, I think that the implication here is that if it only monochrome, it’s shit. Which implies, more broadly, both that people simply expect colour displays these days – fair enough, I guess, if a bit unimaginative – and also expect their gadgets to be general purpose, good-for-everything devices. Interesting.

Colour E Ink is in development, and I can see its value for magazines, websites and some technical manuals or richly-illustrated novels, but I’m perfectly happy with monochrome for reading novels – and that, after all, is what the Kindle’s for. (It’s very good at it, too, though it’s much, much less good at non-linear media such as newspapers and websites. The developers have tried, implementing clever nav elements for newspapers, say, but the experience is still sub-optimal. Sometimes, simply taking the time to adapt to a new way of interacting with media reveals the new system to be either as good as, better than, or merely different to the old paradigm, but in this case, the linearity of the reading experience on a Kindle just can’t compete with the inter- and intra-page flickability and serendipity of a physical mag or paper.)

But if colour E Ink is so far away, why not just use traditional LCDs or even those OLEDs that gets the geeks priapic with anticipation? Because they’re the wrong choice for this platform. Not only do both consume significantly more power than E Ink – the battery on my Kindle can last weeks between charges, depending on how much reading I manage to fit in – but they’re also both much less pleasant to read. Honestly: E Ink is a revelation, and it’s considerably gentler on the eyes, especially after a working day spent bathed in LCD backlight.

[Actual answer: no]

Can you read your email on it?
Curious; the question’s not usually “Can it browse the web?” but “Can it do email?” I don’t know whether this is because as a primarily text-based device, people associate it with messaging, because people perceive it as a potential productivity tool, because we just plain want our devices to be capable of email, or because this is another test, another enquiry designed to ascertain whether this new thing is, in the abstract, ‘good’. Regardless, it’s another example of how, apparently, we’re starting to shun single-function devices, and place a greater burden of ability on the personal technology that companies want us to buy. Perhaps that’s blinkered; perhaps it’s only now that people are even imagining a multi-function device is feasible; the ten-year-old me didn’t even think to ask the question ‘can this Discman make phone calls?’ because it was so utterly obvious that it couldn’t. Stick a big bitmap display on something, now that components are small, the internet exists, and wireless bandwidth is ubiquitous, and it really is now a question of ‘what can’t this device do?’ rather than what can it.

[Actual answer: yes, though some webmail interfaces, if you’re in a territory where Amazon allows you to access any web site through the built-in browser; in the UK, for example, since the Kindle is a US device roaming internationally, for which Amazon is paying the data bill, you may only access the English-language version of Wikipedia.]

None of these questions presage especially dramatic wider social shifts in and of themselves, but I was struck by how significant the Kindle felt, how it focussed – and sometimes, with good reason, ran contrary to – many of the trends in consumer technology. Speaking on the PC Pro podcast, David Fearon, the magazine’s rather brilliant deputy editor, commented (and I’m paraphrasing) that the Kindle felt somehow important, like it felt like something – a product, a service, a model – was trying to take shape in your hand. I’ve no idea what that something is, but I feel it too.

(If you buy the international edition of the Kindle 2 or the larger Kindle DX from these links, I get commission from Amazon.)