The good news is that Kindle DX
The good news is that Kindle DX introduces native support for documents in PDF form. You can connect the Kindle to a computer via USB and drag PDFs over, or e-mail them to yourself for wireless transfer to the Kindle by Amazon (which charges 15 cents a megabyte for the service). The ones I moved onto the device retained their formatting and looked good given that the Kindle’s screen has only sixteen shades of gray to work with:
As nice as the PDF feature is, I wish that Amazon had also built in compatibility with Microsoft Office documents in .DOC, .XLS, and .PPT form–a feature which the Plastic Logic reader, which is due next year, will apparently offer. (Kindles do handle .DOC documents, but only through Amazon’s for-pay e-mail conversion service.)
The basic Kindle user interface remains the same, with buttons and a tiny joystick for navigating between and within books, plus a QWERTY keyboard for searching and taking notes. But Amazon did make a few tweaks. For one thing, it removed the buttons for flipping forward and backward in books from the left edge of the reader, leaving it with ones for this purpose only on the right side of the screen. Steve Levy, in his review of theKindle DX for Wired, says he misses the left-hand buttons and worries that southpaws will have trouble using the device; both Steve and the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossbergspeak of lefties having to rotate the Kindle 180 degrees so that the controls and QWERTY keyboard are upside-down, with upside-down labels. That sounds untenable. But for what it’s worth, I’m a southpaw myself but have always clutched Kindles in my left hand and used my right hand to poke at the controls, so the new design still worked.
The Kindle DX’s keyboard is a departure from the ones on both the original Kindle and the Kindle 2: The keys are now shaped like Tic Tacs, and there are only four rows of keys versus five on the Kindle 2–you must hold down an ALT key to type numbers. Typing still isn’t much fun, but that’s ultimately not a huge issue, since it’s unlikely that you’ll use the keyboard for tapping out more than a few words at a time.
The worst thing about the Kindle DX is its new auto-rotate feature, which allegedly notices when you’ve rotated the device from portrait orientation to landscape or vice versa and adjusts the image on the screen appropriately. In my tests, this sometimes worked correctly, albeit sluggishly; but it often didn’t flip when I wanted it to, or flipped when I would have preferred that it didn’t. In no case did it contribute to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s oft-stated design goal for the Kindle, which is that it be "invisible"–I was always painfully aware I was using a fidgety electronic gadget. Fortunately, you can disable the auto-rotation and adjust the screen yourself as necessary.
Lastly there’s that price–$489, which is $130 more than the Kindle 2, and a fairly stiff cost for a gizmo of any sort. It’s high enough that it’s a factor in my bottom-line Kindle buying advice–which is to consider opting for the Kindle 2. It packs most of what’s good about the Kindle DX into a more compact, travel-friendly case. And the virtues of the Kindle DX’s bigger display are limited as long as most of its content doesn’t retain book-like graphics and formatting.
The good news is that Kindle DX introduces native support for documents in PDF form. You can connect the Kindle to a computer via USB and drag PDFs over, or e-mail them to yourself for wireless transfer to the Kindle by Amazon (which charges 15 cents a megabyte for the service). The ones I moved onto the device retained their formatting and looked good given that the Kindle’s screen has only sixteen shades of gray to work with:
As nice as the PDF feature is, I wish that Amazon had also built in compatibility with Microsoft Office documents in .DOC, .XLS, and .PPT form–a feature which the Plastic Logic reader, which is due next year, will apparently offer. (Kindles do handle .DOC documents, but only through Amazon’s for-pay e-mail conversion service.)
The basic Kindle user interface remains the same, with buttons and a tiny joystick for navigating between and within books, plus a QWERTY keyboard for searching and taking notes. But Amazon did make a few tweaks. For one thing, it removed the buttons for flipping forward and backward in books from the left edge of the reader, leaving it with ones for this purpose only on the right side of the screen. Steve Levy, in his review of theKindle DX for Wired, says he misses the left-hand buttons and worries that southpaws will have trouble using the device; both Steve and the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossbergspeak of lefties having to rotate the Kindle 180 degrees so that the controls and QWERTY keyboard are upside-down, with upside-down labels. That sounds untenable. But for what it’s worth, I’m a southpaw myself but have always clutched Kindles in my left hand and used my right hand to poke at the controls, so the new design still worked.
The Kindle DX’s keyboard is a departure from the ones on both the original Kindle and the Kindle 2: The keys are now shaped like Tic Tacs, and there are only four rows of keys versus five on the Kindle 2–you must hold down an ALT key to type numbers. Typing still isn’t much fun, but that’s ultimately not a huge issue, since it’s unlikely that you’ll use the keyboard for tapping out more than a few words at a time.
The worst thing about the Kindle DX is its new auto-rotate feature, which allegedly notices when you’ve rotated the device from portrait orientation to landscape or vice versa and adjusts the image on the screen appropriately. In my tests, this sometimes worked correctly, albeit sluggishly; but it often didn’t flip when I wanted it to, or flipped when I would have preferred that it didn’t. In no case did it contribute to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s oft-stated design goal for the Kindle, which is that it be "invisible"–I was always painfully aware I was using a fidgety electronic gadget. Fortunately, you can disable the auto-rotation and adjust the screen yourself as necessary.
Lastly there’s that price–$489, which is $130 more than the Kindle 2, and a fairly stiff cost for a gizmo of any sort. It’s high enough that it’s a factor in my bottom-line Kindle buying advice–which is to consider opting for the Kindle 2. It packs most of what’s good about the Kindle DX into a more compact, travel-friendly case. And the virtues of the Kindle DX’s bigger display are limited as long as most of its content doesn’t retain book-like graphics and formatting.
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