Great post by Marco about the circumstances when you need a Kindle. His post reminded me of my wife and I’s recent backpacking trip.

We get to camp and are resting, my wife turns to me and says: “Can we play some games on your iPad?” Now perhaps this is a testament to how many places I take my iPad (everywhere) but I decided not to add yet another 1.5lbs to my backpack for the sake of having an iPad. I would have liked for my wife to have brought her Kindle along for us to read, but we both forgot about it.

If Marco is anything like me, when you backpack with your wife you end up carrying most of the weight – I try to carry as much as I can leaving her with less. It makes the trip easier and more enjoyable for her.

The interesting part about hiking and technology is that it all comes down to weight – with hiking gear you pay a lot of money for good gear that weighs next to nothing. It makes so much sense to take an Kindle over a book or an iPad.

On a separate note I feel the pain Marco must in having to not bring the 5D with him. As someone who loves photography it always is a struggle deciding whether to carry the extra weight of a dSLR compared to a well equipped point and shoot such as Marco’s S90 or my G9.

Marco nails this point though:

Gizmodo and the like probably don’t care that the Kindle is the perfect device for so many uses like this that people encounter on a regular basis in Real Life. But Kindle owners, and Amazon, don’t need them to.