209 of 228 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Where's the Beef?, March 10, 2009
This review is from: Technology Review (Kindle Edition)
I just received my first issue dated April 1st, 2009. I was very interested in the cover article on "The 10 Emerging Technologies of 2009". But where is it? There is only the opening introduction and then nothing - not one of those top 10 technologies. After a couple days of searching the mag on the Kindle thinking "it must be here", I gave up. Upon going to the website for Technology Review, there it is again, but fully available. All 10 technologies with individual articles on each. I am not paying for a subscription to get a teaser to bring me to their website. I saw other articles in this months issue that were not available also, such "Electric Avenue" and "How Lasers Can Heal Surgeons' Incisions". I did see references to these articles in the "From the Editor" and "Contributors" sections.
This is not acceptable to me. I am paying for a product, the full magazine in this case and not teasers to get me to come to their website.
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49 of 50 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent content, formatting needs overhaul., March 10, 2009
This review is from: Technology Review (Kindle Edition)
I've received two issues of this magazine so far and it's been good for the price. The content is varied and significantly more detailed when compared to similar magazines along the lines of Popular Science and Popular Mechanics. The formatting, however, needs serious work as some articles can be difficult to read.
Examples of this are:
- Stray hyphens from the original magazine formatting (i.e., "tech-nology" on a single line and -significant -amounts -of -words -with -hyphens -in -front -of -them, even if they're in the middle of a line)
- Lines of text that reference non-existent pictures or graphics (should either be removed or reworded in proofreading if it's not possible to include the graphic)
- And finally, the strangest out of all of them, there's one word per issue that will always have an umlaut over one of it's vowels. This occurs on every incidence of that single word throughout the magazine.
Additionally, when graphics are included (usually graphs and charts) they're useless. Not because they're monochrome interpretations of a color image---no, there's a bigger problem that comes before that. The issue is that the images are merely thumbnails...even if you click on them to make the image full screen. Either way you have a useless image. The thumbnails are too small, and the expanded image is a mass of indistinct pixels through which you can scry only a blurry line (or bar) graph, or pie chart.
Back on the positive side, unlike the other magazines available for the Kindle, this magazine is more dependent on text than pictures. Therefore, any pictures typically are not an integral part of the article. Plus, it's cheap. (although, if I was picky, I'd say it should be cheaper since it's bi-monthly---Newsweek is only 24 cents more per month, and that's a weekly magazine)
I'll be keeping the subscription. The content is still very readable despite its flaws, and it makes for great reading when you've finished the daily newspaper but don't have enough time to read a chapter of a novel.
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19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Kindle DX text to voice, September 6, 2009
This review is from: Technology Review (Kindle Edition)
I drive quite a bit and so I use the text to voice option in order to keep up on my "reading". Granted, when the rare occasion presents itself, I prefer to actually read. But, like most, I'm very busy. This is one of the main reasons I purchased the Kindle and I'm so glad I did. While it isn't perfect, it is good enough that I get what I need.
That having been said; I know this isn't a review of text to voice, but it plays into my review of the Kindle version of Technology Review. The magazine itself is very good, but not great. The articles are well written and informative. Often I find them to be a little to light on detail, however. I prefer for them to delve into a subject more, rather than provide what feels more like a briefing or synopsis. The editing does leave a little to be desired due to the random hyphen that causes the speech to mispronounce words in the most peculiar ways. It would seem that using a simple spell-check program when authoring the thing would only add a couple minutes to the editing process. If I were reading most anything else this might be easier to overlook. But, this is called Technology Review and is from MIT. Maybe not the best foot forward.
That having been said, I'll definetly be keeping my subscription. I'll just hope they put a little more review in future issues.
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