Today a friend of mine let me play around with his new Amazon kindle 2. Needless to say I am jealous, tech toy envy is not good. I was aware of the older legacy kindle, I think is was called the kindle 1, and it looks like the designers really packed this new puppy with features. If you don’t know what a kindle is, basically it is an electronic book reader. Here is the cool thing though, unlike reading a PDF or a word document on a laptop, which becomes very tiresome, the kindle uses something called electronic paper technology.
The technology behind electronic paper is that it does not have the same glare that you get when reading text from a laptop, or PC. If you have ever tried to read anything on a laptop on a sunny day, much less even a cloudy day forget it, the glare is too much to deal with.
Carlos gave me a quick tutorial on using it, I have to say it is an easy learning curve, even for the most technically challenged.If you have a hard time with small fonts, what I call mice type, kind of like what you may be reading now 
. The Kindle2 has a function where you can change the font size, and font type on the fly. The kindle really looks like something apple would have designed, because it is very thin like the new Iphone, itouch etc…
By the way Carlos also has an iphone, he downloaded the free app on the Apple app store, and we did some comparisons, if you like constantly having to move the page around to read it, I guess it is close to reading any text on the iphone. Not sure if they have an app for itouch?
It weighs around 10 ounces but has a very sturdy feel just like apples products. He says the battery life is around 4 days, which I question that, but from what I have read about the new things they are doing with battery life technology I guess it is possible.
I have been very interested in ebook readers for sometime, I read articles about what was coming years ago when I got into reading e-books on my laptop. It looks like the technology has finally caught up with the predictions. So much is packed into this thing and the learning curve on it is dog simple.
You can bookmark pages and go back to where you left off reading. Also it has a feature where you can make notes / annotate sections on the sides of the pages just like you could in a real paper book.
I have always had an interest in finding ways to not use so much paper. I quit taking the newpaper years ago when I was able to get all my news, local and nationwide online. This little device has green written all over it’s face. I can only imagine the eco-friendly devices, and solutions to our wastefull habits that are in store for us in the future.
So my question is, how many of the books that I like to read are available on the kindle 2. Carlos says the info he read states right now there are around a quarter of a million books available for download.
I really go excited when I found out that free wireless connectivity is included in the price. You can browse Amazon’s kindle book store, and find your book and download it from any location where their wireless coverage is available. It seems that the wireless coverage should be pretty good, as Amazon’s whispernet they say is somehow linked in with Sprint’s 3G network. I know that sprint has really been beefing up their 3g network over the past few years, it, “publicly available wireless connectivity” is just one of the “big shifts” of the internet. So you know what this means for the kindle, and any other device using an available 3g network? No more looking for a wireless hotspot.
Previous owners of the original kindel can download all their previous purchases.
The big draw to me is if you are an avid reader like me you can save half on best sellers, you can get your subscriptions to your favorite magazines and news papers, and I looked out on Amazon and it says they are auto delivered to your Kindle 2. It had big name newspapers like the Wall St. Journal, and The New York Times. Can you imagine how much paper could be saved.
Last he showed me that it has free wireless access to wikipedia included, and free access to an online dictionary, I forgot the name of the dictionary site.
I think I covered all the feature that he ran through in about ten minutes.
Oh, almost forgot this one, when your eyes get tired of reading you can switch over to text to speech mode, and it will read to you. It sounds like the normal top of the line text to speech program, which I really don’t like that much, but nevertheless you can rest your eyes and finish off a chapter or two.
So I started searching for prices out there, I looked on ebay and found kindles being bid up beyond the new and used prices that are on Amazon, that does not make sense to me, unless you like wasting money.
I will be putting this on my wish list for Christmas. I usually don’t get expensive gifts for Christmas, although I would gladly forgo a Birthday gift to get my hands on one.
Kindle 2: Amazon’s New Wireless Reading Device (Latest Generation)
Posted under General interests, Hobbies, Real-time, books, favorite books, gadgets
This post was written by Andrew on March 28, 2009
