Feb
26
2009
Kindle 2 Review is up! And: Bonus Screenshots
Posted by: Ihnatko in gadget, suntimes, yellowtextMy Kindle 2 review is up on the Sun-Times site for your glorious edification. I thought some of you might also like to see a few screenshots of the K2 in action.
First page of my library. Here be all your books & papers.
Basic reading. This is a Fast Company article that Stanza downloaded and converted to Kindle format.
Okay, let's go do some web surfin'. Menu...ACTIVATE!
Google Reader might justify the cost of the Kindle all by itself. It turns every blog into a Kindle-friendly format, easy as pie.
Yes, you can even Twitter with it! The screen really isn't fast enough for long typing, but hey, it works!
Entries (RSS)
February 26th, 2009 at 2:55 pm
The review appears to have a typo… or there’s actually an iPhone 3D in the works that nobody’s announced yet.
February 26th, 2009 at 3:03 pm
So, how does the Kindle/Kindle 2 handle pdf documents? I am a scientist and a table-top gamer. Scientific journal articles and RPG books are both readily avaialble in pdf format. I’d rather use my iPhone, but it can’t handle larger pdf documents without taking forever to load or crashing.
February 26th, 2009 at 6:36 pm
In the browser menu choose “Use Advanced Mode”. You get 16 grayscales and graphics!
February 26th, 2009 at 10:57 pm
How are you able to take screenshots on the kindle?
February 27th, 2009 at 9:30 am
Reminds me of System 7.
March 2nd, 2009 at 3:31 am
Read your review – and yeah, I agree that I won’t be replacing my Kindle for a Kindle 2 any time soon. Though I disagree with your assessment of the Kindle 1’s design – I was pleasantly surprised when I first held and used it at how intuitive and well-designed it was, coming from a company that had previously designed…um, a book sales website that mutated into a department store website.
What I’d really like to see in future Kindles is an at least eight-bit color version of eInk (for color images like comic pages and newspaper photos); automatic translation of eBook formats like Plucker (used by Gutenberg Project), HTML, PDB and PDF rather than “e-mail your file to us and we’ll translate it for you” (a feature I never use and probably never will because I don’t like or trust it); a flip-up LED light (not backlighting, as those eat battery life and cause eyestrain headaches if you try long periods of reading that way); a much better Web browsing interface (because the current one makes me yearn for my old Blackberry’s clunky Web interface!); and most importantly, a $99 or less Device Price (for which I would gladly forgo everything else on my wish list).
March 2nd, 2009 at 3:33 am
Keith, if it’s like the Kindle 1 – you have to e-mail your PDF to Amazon and they WhisperNet it back to you as a Kindle-compatible file. There’s no charge for now – but I don’t like that they want to see what I’m reading before they elect to translate it for me…. :(
March 12th, 2009 at 9:59 am
Just shut the hell up will you? You talk for 15 minutes straight and you don’t say a thing. You are so in love with your own voice, and you like to hear yourself talk so much that you can never get your point across. Try and concentrate on one thought at a time. You always have to have your own opinion and your own little example of what you want to say, but you never finish one thought before you start another one.
March 12th, 2009 at 10:07 am
P.S. on MBW, you are the most annoying and the most crazy sounding guy.
March 12th, 2009 at 10:49 am
@bob thorpe: Clearly, SOMEBODY needs to get his cranky-pants off and take a nap, b/c he’s throwing a tantrum in public.
FYI, I enjoy listening to Andy on MBW, and far prefer his humor and his insight to the hypercaffinated elitist snobbery of, say, The Boastfully Illiterate, Proudly Pro-Censorship and Gleefully Union-Busting Alex Lindsay of Pixel Corps infamy….
March 13th, 2009 at 10:14 am
Does the K2 have the ability to display the text any larger than the K1? Mom’s 84, and still loves to read, but even the largest text on the K1 is too small for her.
March 16th, 2009 at 11:45 pm
Thanks for the review Andy I’ve been curious about the updated Kindle. Any chance you’ll post your review of Watchmen?
March 19th, 2009 at 12:20 pm
Hmmm… first time I’ve seen the interface for the Kindle and I can’t help but think about curses on a unix terminal. I know the thing is basically for reading, but did they need to make the interface look so archaic?
March 23rd, 2009 at 10:39 pm
Someone said it reminded them of System 7, but with the book layout and fonts, it seems older. Sort of like a steampunk web browser.
March 24th, 2009 at 3:12 am
Ryan, it reminds ME of the lame browser that came w/my (thankfully former!) Blackberry Pearl. To its credit, the interface very good for reading books – magazines, newspapers and blogs, not so much as the layout’s clumsy and the screen is too small.
I’ve heard reports of Hearst coming up with an eBook reader primarily for newspapers and magazines, that will be open to more competing formats than the Kindle is. Hopefully it will be significantly larger as well – say, about the size of a clipboard so it can be flipped on its side for facing-page digest sized reading – while retaining some kind of online connectivity so we can download content directly to it and possibly Web surf as well (it doesn’t have to be free WhisperNet like the Kindle has – it could be either WiFi and/or paid mobile data to keep the initial cost down). Though these are less important, I’d also like to see a full-color screen (especially if Hearst wants to offer their magazines virtually this way!) and a built-in cover rather than the Kindle’s screen being exposed to everything – and though this is serious blueskying, I think Hearst could justify a significantly higher cost (like $450 – $500) if this hypothetical cover doubled as a keyboard and the reader had basic Netbook functionality (true Web surfing, e-mail, basic office and media features) as well as eBook reading….
April 17th, 2009 at 9:31 am
The link to your review doesn’t work – is there anywhere else I could view it? Thanks.
January 18th, 2010 at 1:30 pm
Between myself and my brother we have owned more gizmos over the years than I can count, including GPS units, iPods (classic & touch), etc. I love Amazon’s kindel, it’s by far the coolest toy I got. Why? Because I was very happy to discover how well-designed and fun it was and how easy it is to use . Make sure you accuire the cover though as it will get scratched pretty easily.