That doesn't really make much sense. If reading articles is your main application for the device, why not buy the iPad 2 especially after the huge price drop?
It's the screen. My main motivation for upgrading to from the iPhone 3GS to the 4 was the Retina display, and it was important to me because I do a ton of reading on my phone. Much of it in Instapaper, actually.
I often have problems with eye irritation/fatigue after a long day of work and thought an e-ink device would make night reading easier. Got a kindle touch, tried it for a week. It was worse, without a doubt. I tend to read in dim light (indirect lamp), and found that the kindle needed direct light for me to easily read without eyestrain. iPad with very low brightness, or even in reversed accessibility mode is nicer. For me, that is. And, any book or paper with code samples just doesn't work well on a small e-ink screen.
I've been relatively happy with the IPS panel in the iPad 1 not straining my eyes. My main gripe is that the brightness of the backlight doesn't go low enough -- in a dark room (i.e. in bed with no lights and someone else sleeping nearby), it would be nice to be able to use the iPad with very minimal backlight. E-Ink would require a book light (which is kind of lame). This seems to be one of the places where OLED would be superior.
It's frustrating that IPS LCD, OLED, and E-Ink all have such distinct advantages, so the idea of having a single device with the best screen in all contexts isn't really possible. I assume OLED will eventually be that.
There's nothing inherent in e-ink that makes it less stressful than a backlit display. Photons are photons, whether they are reflected from a light bulb or the sun to the book and then your eyes, or they are send from a led behind the screen to your eyes.
Some early e-ink manufactures used to claim that e-ink is better than backlit for the eyes, but they retracted those claims because there was no scientific evidence behind them.
You just need to set the brightness of the iPad appropriately, to match what the relative brightness of an e-ink reader would be. You can also adjust the colors, i.e have a sepia background etc.
Battery life and reading in the sun is indeed much better with e-ink devices, though.
I can attest that the Kindle Fire is a perfect reading device. Perfect form factor, light yet feels great, etc. I really don't think an iPad is great for reading based on size, but I've never had one long enough to try it.
I had a Fire and really didn't like it for reading -- it falls in the valley of uselessness between a Kindle (DX being my favorite) and the iPad. I don't find my iPad 1 particularly heavy -- the main drawback of the iPad vs. Kindles is lack of daylight readability, and to a lesser degree, potentially distracting apps (email, web).
The Fire seems like a great video watching device, but I don't do much of that (and when I do, it's on a projector with surround sound and other people)
Quite on point. Few people would willingly admit to this, but a lot of research suggests that simply having options available imposes a real cognitive load. Simple additions to text like footnotes and hyperlinks produce real drops in recall/comprehension - it's not a stretch to apply this to the iPad with its notifications and rich entertainment options.
The kindle has only two things that make it competitive enough to be worthy of discussion- e-ink and lighter weight. In every other category (ok, excluding price) it fails compared to the iPad.
on e-ink there isn't really an advantage to my eyes. I've never gotten eyestrain reading on my (first generation) iPad. The image quality of the e-ink display is worse than even the first generation iPad (to my eyes), in large part because the e-ink display is not responsive.
weight- I deal with it on the iPad. The kindle is better in this regard, but not enough to make it compelling.
Amazon had a great product in the original kindle, but it was a single purpose product. It hasn't kept up (or e-ink hasn't advanced fast enough) and its losing the race.