Originally – that was my review wrote on Amazon.com. It’s stil unpublished – maybe because of “sensitive” content. However, I wanted to share it with you.
Almost perfect. But only ‘almost’. Why? I have no concerns about reading converted ebooks (in Amazon’s format or Mobi or ‘Calibred’ EPUBs->Mobi). It really great! But it’s only for ‘hardcode’ readers who reads only text. But ‘cmon, Amazon! DO SOMETHING WITH PATHETIC PDF VIEWER! It’s absolutely useless! We all know it can be done better. How we do know that? It’s easy- chinese alternative firmware (called Duokan) has almost perfect PDF viewer. It has all the features missed from the original one firmware:
- free-hand zoom factor. You can set 110% or 102%. You don’t have to stick to 100% or 150% or 200% as it is in original kindle
- smarter movement after zooming. On kindle scroll of zoomed display is always inappropriate.
- faster!
Of course – ‘modification’ of original firmware most likely it’s breaking of Amazon’s licence but… who cares?! If I can turn my device from “almost-useless-for-PDFs” to “really-nice-reading-of-PDFs-although-6”-display-and-now-I’m-truly-in-love-with-it” I don’t hesitate.
I really like documents delivery over the air. I must admit – I use it 100% over wifi but most the time I’m too lazy to get a cable, connect it to my laptop, drag the doc from laptop to Kindle. It’s muuuch easier just to send it over email. And if you have Mac OS X you can easily prepare simple automator script and make this simple sending even simpler (just one click).
After years spent on reading ebooks on PDAs and iPhone now I’m asking myself: “why so late?!”. Reading experience is amazing. And there is no video or review which can express it. You have like-real-book experience without weight and smell of real book.
Rest is same (or better). I do buy ebooks. But 90% books I read for pleasure is in Polish. Kindle deals with Polish language very well. Much better than Amazon does – library of Polish books almost do not exists in Amazon. That’s why I buy books in Polish ebook stores and – of course! – they are DRMed in a way non-compatible with Kindle. But at this moment it’s not a problem to DeDRM it and read on any viewer.
I had hard time to decide Kindle or iPad? If I could spend 3-4x more money – most likely I’d buy iPad. But only for 189U$ I have ultimate reading device. With small flaws that could be easily overcome.
For sure – for now it’s my favorite electronic gadget.
Jarek