I love my Kindle 1. It beats carrying a whole bunch of books around when traveling for work, and as many reviewers have noted, as soon as you start reading a book on it (and get used to the tricks required not to accidentally advance the pages) it just melts away and lets you focus on the content itself.

But having taken it on vacation for the first time this week, I've noticed something interesting about my own behavior. Rather than sitting by the pool reading the Kindle, I found myself spending time on Google's excellent version of Reader mobile, taking great pleasure in actually having the time to read what I mostly just skim.

After burning through two full battery charges while reading content on the iPhone's tiny 3.5 inch screen, I began to wonder whether I might be able to get the same experience from the Kindle, first by trialing a number of the magazine subscriptions available, and then by forwarding custom issues of Tabbloid to it. In neither case however, was I left satisfied, preferring instead to resort to the tiny phone screen despite how unpleasant it is to spend an hour reading off of it.

Which is to say, for magazine and online content, the Kindle is flawed mostly because the combination of screen refresh rate and overall device speed make it a real offline device. You can not credibly follow links, share content, or send a quick email— three actions that I now realize are more critical to consuming perishable (timely) content than are glossy layouts, displays that don't tire the eyes, or even a number of product compromises that I would have previously considered dealkillers for a Kindle-like device.

[Funny to accuse a gadget that comes with a perpetual 3G data connection built in of that, eh?]

This new form of content consumption is why I'm fast becoming a believer in the 7-inch capacitive touchscreen form factor that Apple and others are rumored to be working on for release in the next year. Though a lot of things could be sacrificed on such a device, it would need three attributes to fit this new type of reading: 1. a killer web browser with as close to a ubiquitous Internet connection as can be arranged (either tethered to a mobile phone or directly wired into a 3G network), 2. battery life that is acceptable (2-3 hours would actually be ok so long as recharge time was 1 hour), and most importantly, 3. not too much weight on the device. Notice I said "too much" because I actually believe that a device that weighs say what my HP 1000 netbook weighs would actually be ok. Not great, but worth the compromise for the connectivity it would bring.

Note also that I didn't mention video, music, or any of the things that people clamor for their smartphones to be able to do. While I think that the ability to play back embedded Flash videos would be a nice feature) given how predominant embedded videos have become on web, it would not be essential. Nor would an "App Store" or any of the other things that the smartphone makers are now fighting to bring to market with new twists and turns.

Finally, I've recently become a big fan of the crude-but-effective "buckets of money" theory for consumer products. You buy an iPhone with money from the bucket for cellphone spending. You buy an LCD TV from the entertainment bucket, and so on. The challenge with a product like this is that the closest bucket is the PC spending one which could make it difficult to get a new toehold in the market. PC prices are plummeting and netbooks are quickly sucking up any new dollars there.

But I'd buy one!