Kindle and unitasking

Tom Weber, on how using a Kindle makes him less distracted, thus enabling "unitasking":

That’s why the Kindle experience stands in such great contrast. When my Kindle arrived from Amazon earlier this year, it felt at first like a severely crippled computer. After all, it has a display screen, a keyboard—even a wireless connection and a web browser of sorts. But every time I tried to indulge my digital-media-trained attention span, pausing in the middle of a book or article to check baseball scores or skim a few blogs, the experience was too cumbersome to enjoy.

Over a few weeks, I rediscovered my ability to simply read the book or article I had punched up in the first place. (Just like—gasp!—old-fashioned printed matter.) It’s particularly enjoyable when reading a newspaper or magazine—enough so that I’ve been routinely purchasing some of these publications when I could have grabbed my laptop and read them for free on the web. In effect, I’m paying for the lack of distraction.

I question whether this phenomenon is the result of simply being enthralled with a new device. Seems that Kindles, iPhones, and Blackberrys all make us fixate upon them as sources of information and entertainment when they are brand new. But, as we possess them longer, and new apps and features become available, I feel that we integrate them seemlessly into our daily lives and unconciously utilize the multi-tasking features that are too tempting to resist.