We so LOVE hot new products, the Geek and the Gadfly do. We’re getting pretty excited by Amazon’s new Kindle. Amazon has done an amazing thing with the Kindle, which is to get it right enough in its first version that you can see how it will play out and be a successful product. It is, indeed, the iPod for book readers.

First clue: Multiple people from different walks of life who don’t know each other each have remarked to the Gadfly on how interesting and engaging they find the idea of the Kindle. The Geek (of course) was the first to do so, by ordering the Kindle early enough that he got one of the first. But the Gadfly suspected him of just being a geek and wanting the device to check it out technically. But then the Gadfly got a ride from his friend Michael (also geeky), who had one in his car with him and professed to actually being reading books. And then his friend Sara, who is the chief editor of Publishers Weekly (like the bible of the book industry!) and a major thought leader in book publishing, brought hers on vacation with her and was clearly using it to read books . The clincher: the Gadfly’s 22-year-old son ordered a Kindle online because he loves the idea of being able to bring books when he travels without carting the actual books.

The Gadfly reported all this to the Geek and got this evaluation in return:

“First off, it’s not a book and using a Kindle is not a ‘book experience’. That said, the Kindle will change the way you read. I now use the Kindle to read all of my newspapers (San Francisco Chronicle, Wall Street Journal, and New York Times). I’ve also completely read half a dozen books (three non-fiction including one highly technical book and three science fiction books) and have started four new ones. I am convinced that I will read just about all of my future books (as long as they don’t contain too many illustrations or pictures) using the Kindle. Here are my reasons why:

“1) It’s lighter than a book: I can hold it with one hand for a very long time while I’m reading. I can book surf and read a chapter here and a chapter there…I no longer have decide ahead of time what I want to carry with me on my trips.

“2) I can buy books on impulse. I’ve bought more books in the last few weeks on the Kindle than I did in the last six months in print!

“3) It’s really fast to download and you can store a ton of books (literally) especially if you add a 2GB SD card. (To offset the cost of the SD card, the books are 40%-70% cheaper than their printed versions.)

“4) I love the fact that Amazon stores everything you bought and you can move easily between local memory and remote storage.

“5) The device is really well designed as a starting point: The key/button layout is a bit frustrating in the beginning, but you get used to holding the Kindle after reading the first couple of books and then it becomes intuitive. The screen isn’t as good as paper, but it’s easier on the eyes than a LCD screen and works well out doors. The battery life is pretty good as long as you use the wireless on only when you need it; I’ve read two complete books on one charge.

“6) It’s a completely different experience than the Sony Portable Reader System PRS-500, primarily because the Kindle is not tied to the personal computer. Just turn it on and go. It could be the difference between a device designed by an electronics manufacturer and a device designed by a major bookseller….

“The Kindle is a 1.0 device and has lots of problems. But it’s good enough that you learn to overcome them to get something that will change the way you read. In fact, I think the Kindle is a bigger breakthrough device than the iPhone.”

There you have it: The Gadfly’s partner thinks Kindle is a really big deal! (Gadfly might suspect Geek of being particularly motivated by the fact that Amazon’s inspiration for the design of Kindle clearly came from the Star Trek PADD.)

Having had these experiences with friends and partners about the Kindle, Gadfly finds himself going back to his days as a pundit and thinking that this is exactly what makes for a successful product, very much the same kind of reaction people had to the iPod, the PalmPilot, the IBM PC, even VisiCalc, all great products in version 1.0.

Gadfly is tempted to opine that the trick in this case is a technical trick that most commentators are reluctant to describe because it’s too techie for consumers: Amazon built an EV-DO cellular phone into the device and then made a deal with Sprint to allow them to bundle the cost of the service into the price of the device and the books that you buy. So there’s no subscription cost for the device or for the wireless service, but it works almost everywhere in the U.S. EV-DO is not available almost anywhere else in the world and does not cover 100% of the US, but it’s much more available than WiFi signals, which is why it was such a brilliant thing to make it a free part of the Kindle. But it actually doesn’t matter; the fact is that this device is completely worthy of a Steve Jobs Merit Award for product design and it’s amazing that it came from a retailer, Amazon.com. Jeff Bezos should get recognition (since I’m pretty sure he personally drove the project through his company) for adding real value to the book industry and showing that Jobs isn’t the only guy who can make really cool products the first time out the door!

I missed the announcement of a partnership between Amazon and TiVo to deliver video directly from Amazon to (non-DirecTV) TiVo DVRs. I even missed the delivery of the service. Then I stumbled on it when I went to order a new product at Amazon: I can now buy or rent movies and TV shows to be delivered directly to my TiVo recorder. I order and pay on Amazon; the video shows up on TiVo the next time it checks in. All I had to do was enter my TiVo user name and password at Amazon. (The rental deal, by the way, isn’t all that good: 30 days to view, but only 24 hours to finish once you’ve started.)

The combination of buying some stuff for my television from iTunes Store (which I can watch on my TV on Apple TV) and buying other stuff for my television from Amazon (which I can watch on my TV on TiVo) seems like a huge deal. The combination means you can watch stuff on your television without ever having to depend on a cable, satellite or broadcast network. Neither library is complete or even particularly compelling, but the combination probably lets you (if you happen to own both a Series 2/3 TiVo and an Apple TV) get a pretty significant library of content — maybe even enough to skip having cable or satellite attached to your television.

That’s what is interesting. Imagine a world where you have an alternative to cable and satellite and even broadcast television! The Apple TV deal means that a computer company is negotiating for rights to distribute video content. And the Amazon/TiVo deal means an internet company is negotiating for rights to distribute video content. It’s a little like when Ted Turner first started distributing old movies on the TNT channel — it seemed barely relevant at the time, but it ended up being a revolution in TV distribution, particularly after he started CNN in 1980 (when it was referred to as the Chicken Noodle Network).

I went to BestBuy on Thursday (January 25) to see about buying a new house computer (the one in the kitchen nobody owns but everybody uses). There were two computers on display; that’s right, two. BestBuy usually (in my personal experience) has around 30-50 computers on display, between all the notebook and desktop models from the 7-8 brands they carry. On Thursday, the shelves were empty except for a couple of computers running Vista in demo mode. But those computers didn’t have pricing.

I discovered that those computers didn’t have pricing because Microsoft decreed that Vista wouldn’t be for sale until the following Tuesday. Now, isn’t that just the most interesting thing you can imagine. I wanted to buy a computer and was ready to walk out of the door with one. But I wasn’t able to buy one and BestBuy wasn’t able to sell me one.

Going forward, I will only be able to buy computers running Microsoft Vista. As far as I can tell, Windows XP has been removed from the market. Microsoft knows better. Too bad I wasn’t able to get the computer.