Okay, so I caved and went and bought a Kindle 2. As there was no order backlog I received mine within two days. Now I never used the original Kindle, just contemplated purchasing it a time or two, so I cannot say from personal experience whether or not Kindle 2 is that much better than the original. What I will tell you is what I think about the Kindle 2 and how I got on with it.
First off, it’s small and pretty light, just like they say. What was surprising is the size of the screen. With all of the talk about the Kindle being the size of a paperback book, and lighter, you tend to lose sight of the fact that the display screen is going to be smaller. In fact the display screen is on 3.6″x4.8″ (6″ diagonal) in size. According to Wikipedia paperbacks come in a number of standard sizes, the smallest of which is “A Format” at 4.33″x7.01″ (110mmx178mm). So while the Kindle itself is roughly the size of a “C Format” paperback, the screen is quite a bit smaller than even the smallest paperback. So when reading a book a ‘page’ on the Kindle isn’t equivalent to a page on a paperback book. It is true that you can change the font size so you could go to a smaller font and hence get more words on a ‘page’ but even then, not as many as a paperback. I’ve included a photo of my Kindle, with a page from one of the books I purchased, below.
Having said all that it’s not so bad, having a smaller page with less text per page. Page turning is done at a press of a button. A momentary pause, flash of the screen, and the new page is displayed. Unlike a book you don’t have to try and keep the pages down, if you’re reading while eating – which I do.
When I got my Kindle I went on line and purchased a couple of books. One a Science-Fantasy, part of a series that I’m reading, called The Lord-Protector’s Daughter by L. E. Modesitt. It cost me $9.99. I also got a couple of IT books, but they’re more expensive; Mastering Active Directory for Windows Server 2008 @ $34.01, Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Unleashed @ $17.59 and Power One Note: Unleash the Power of One Note @ $7.96. I also subscribed to magazine, to try it out. The magazine is Technology Review, the first 14 days are free, after which the monthly subscription is $1.25/month. I probably wont keep this subscription as it’s not a magazine that I’d normally read.
Gray scale pictures
The Kindle 2 went from the 4 levels of gray, of the original Kindle, to 16 levels. As you can see from the images below the graphics aren’t to bad. However, technical documents, especially with complex diagrams, are probably going to suffer.
Readability
I’ve been using the Kindle to read one of the books I purchased and so far it’s been fine. I haven’t tried reading for more than 30-45 minutes at a stretch so far. I’ve also connect the Kindle to my home PC, it shows up as a USB disk. I was able to drag and drop files to it but couldn’t read them – the Kindle only supports specific formats to be able to be read on it. I did test the free service to convert a Word document (.doc) file to the Kindle ink file. Basically you email the Word document to your kindle account @free.kindle.com. You then receive back an email, to your registered account, the ink version of the file that you then drag-and-drop from the PC to the Kindle, just like it was a USB thumb drive.
I’ll probably add an additional post in a couple of weeks once I’ve had more time with the Kindle but so far I quite like it.
Steven JW Kennedy 