Amazon Kindle 3G

[Ian]

I'm a bit of a gadget fiend, but I've always overlooked the Amazon Kindle ebook reader. However, my other half was looking to buy some old classic books - which happen to be free in electronic format. Anyway, to cut a long story short she bought the Kindle 3G ebook reader (£149/$189) and it arrived today

I wasn't expecting much from it, but after a couple of hours of use, I'm very impressed. The e-ink screen is excellent, the resolution is much better than I thought and the brightness/reflectivity isn't too far off reading something on paper. Even better is that it only uses power when changing the display, so the "off" screen is actually a pretty picture .

The 3G model comes with international data roaming (free), so you can download ebooks from most places with a mobile phone signal... The real surprise for me was the WebKit based browser (very similar to Safari on the iPhone) which works on the device. It's slow, non touch screen and only 16 shade grey scale, but it is excellent at rendering sites. I was browsing EP using this just a few moments ago . I'll probably use it for reading news websites, but that's about it. Handy nonetheless!

Has anyone else got one of these and found anything cool that it can do? There looks like there's a little bit of potential for modding one of these!

 

[(*steve*)]

I have a Nook. Pretty much the same sort of thing except it has a small colour touch screen where the kindle has the keyboard.

The Kindle is apparently better at displaying PDFs. The nook can't rotate them or zoom in on them. I'd be keen to hear how the Kindle works from someone who looks at datasheets.

My mother is considering buying a Sony e-book reader. It has a full touch screen and is thus a little smaller than either the Kindle or the Nook as it doesn't need the keyboard or the touch-screen.

EEVBlog reviewed the Kindle 3 recently, and it made me think I should buy one. Barnes & Noble (Nook) don't believe there's a world outside the US, Amazon seem to have discovered there is.

The nook has been rooted, so there is the potential for custom software (it's an android platform I think).

The real issue is that there's not good ebook format supported by all e-book readers, so you tend to be limited to where you can purchase books.

 

[Ian]

I've never heard of the Nook before (UK, so no B&N here), but I've just had a google for it and I really like the look of it - but I think I'd miss the keyboard. Hopefully they'll be able to get color, capacative touch screen "e-paper LCD" readers out soon

I've put a few PDF's on the Kindle so far, and they seem to display OK from what I can tell. That's a bonus for me as some of the longer documents I'd read on it are only in PDF format.

The Kindle store seems to have a reasonable number of books so far and the Gutenberg Project (http://www.gutenberg.org/) has a big list of lots of freebies. I see what you mean about formats, the Gutenberg Project lists about 8 different download formats!!!!

 

[(*steve*)]

You need to look up Calibre. It's a great way to convert from format to format.

It won't work for contents protected by DRM, but there's a lot that isn't.

The lack of a keyboard is no real issue on the nook. The touchscreen operates similarly to an iPhone in that you can use gestures to scroll, and it pops up a quite usable touch keyboard when required.

But yeah, colour touchscreen e-ink -- bring it on.

I fitted a 16GB card to mine, expecting to be a bit of a memory hog. I now have some 300 books on it and haven't cracked the first gig (of 3) on it's built in storage.

These things really come into their own when you're travelling.

 

[Ian]

A pop-up screen is even better! No space needed and works well . It's a shame they don't tell them over here.

Thanks for the heads up on Calibre, it looks excellent and just what I was after - a sort of iTunes for ebooks . I've been downloading them manually from gutenberg so far, but this should help convert everything to the same format (as well as correct/format the metadata - as that sometimes appears differently depending on the source).