paidContent's Joseph Weisenthal got a chance to use Amazon's Kindle Reader, unveiled today, at the product's launch Monday.

“Although Amazon's been working on this for awhile, this is very much a first-generation product,” Weisenthal wrote. “It's not going to revolutionize the industry overnight, though it sounds like Amazon is going to take this business seriously and continue to invest in it. It seems safe to guess that in a couple years, the top-of-the-line Kindle will be a much-improved product.”

Weisenthal made the following points about Jeff Bezos's creation on paidContent.org:

- The screen is not as bright as reading actual paper, and not nearly as effortless as using an iPhone.

- There are 308 blog titles to choose from, organised by category and popularity. Although sites can be accessed through Kindle's web browser for free, Weisenthal stated he opted for a free 14-day trial to the blogs, rather than pay a US $0.99 for a month subscription.

- When reading a book, the tale of contents are hyperlinked, making it easy t jump around. However, there is a screen flash each time a page is flipped, “which sort of makes it hard to get lost in the book,” and users can only flip pages – no scrolling.

- Although Kindle is designed to work best with Amazon's service, Weisenthal was able to send himself a PDF file via his new @kindle.com e-mail address. There is a US $0.10 charge each time this is done, “presumably to pay bandwidth costs.” He also said he was unable to import a file via USB. Kindle's Web site states that documents that are supported on the device are: Microsoft Word documents (.DOC), HTML, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP and TXT.

- As for browsing, “it's obvious that Amazon hasn't invested too much into this functionality.” Because the Kindle is meant to be a book reading device first, and the browser is an additional function that is listed as “experimental” on the Kindle itself, the browser was “fairly clunky and prone to error messages,” Weisenthal stated. “Interestingly though, when you do open a page, it doesn't look bad.”