Kindle started receiving their new Kindle DXs yesterday. The earliest arrival was memberandyadler who received his DX at 10 am. He did note he lives in Louisville, KY, which is the central shipping point for many Amazon deliveries. I am in Maine and mine arrived at 10:38 am and was out of its box by 10:39.
Initial impressions of the Kindle DX seem to be positive. The screen is bright and clear, with good contrast. One member took hers out into the sun and did not report any problems with fading, as was seen on so many of the Kindle2s. (I couldn’t test mine since the great State of Maine has been under a blanket of rain for the past three days!) Personally, I think the auto-rotate feature is very cool. While I was eating lunch, I turned it upside down so the buttons were on the left, allowing me to use my left hand to change the page and continue using my fork with my right hand.
Weight: the Kindle DX weighs 18 oz and my Kindle2 in its Oberon cover weighs 20 oz. Interestingly, the DX "feels" heavier. I think it has to do with the center of gravity, especially if you hold it near the bottom. Of course, the perfect solution was sitting right on my desk: an old, metal copy holder for papers (which I never use anymore). TheKindle DX fits like a glove. It also fits very nicely in the Peeramid pillow.
We have lots of mini-reviews and first impressions posts at KindleBoards. Some of the more popular include Kindle DX: Your Mini-Reviews, It’s Almost Here, Time for the DX to Ship, and First Person to Receive a Kindle DX. There are also three reviews, with comments, posted in the Reviews Forum, which can be found here.
The Technologizer Review: Amazon Kindle DX
The biggest difference by far is the Kindle DX’s 9.7-inch screen, which is not just far more spacious than the 6-inch display on the Kindle 2 but larger than the Kindle 2, period:
The extra real estate lets the Kindle DX fit more than twice as many words onto a page than the Kindle 2 does; it reduces the amount of button-pushing you need to do and just plain makes the experience feel more like reading a printed book. Like the Kindle 2, the DX is only a third of an inch thick, but it’s much heavier–18.9 ounces instead of the Kindle 2’s 10.2 ounces. I found the extra bulk slightly distracting–while reading, I was more aware I was holding a gadget, and had to worry more about keeping the Kindle balanced in my hands. It’s not a major strike against the DX, but I noticed that Amazon buries the device’s weight in its description of the device and no longer touts it as a virtue.
The company has been pitching the Kindle DX as a better Kindle for reading richly-formatted magazines and newspapers. But it’s important to understand that the magazines and newspapers it sells aren’t Zinio-like replicas of the originals. The E-Ink display is only capable of providing a rough approximation of photos and other images, as shown by this TIME cover:
Worse, TIME’s interiors are plain-text only, making for a pretty drab experience no matter how good the articles are. The only new benefit the Kindle DX offers is more of that plain text on a page than with the little Kindle:
The extra real estate lets the Kindle DX fit more than twice as many words onto a page than the Kindle 2 does; it reduces the amount of button-pushing you need to do and just plain makes the experience feel more like reading a printed book. Like the Kindle 2, the DX is only a third of an inch thick, but it’s much heavier–18.9 ounces instead of the Kindle 2’s 10.2 ounces. I found the extra bulk slightly distracting–while reading, I was more aware I was holding a gadget, and had to worry more about keeping the Kindle balanced in my hands. It’s not a major strike against the DX, but I noticed that Amazon buries the device’s weight in its description of the device and no longer touts it as a virtue.
The company has been pitching the Kindle DX as a better Kindle for reading richly-formatted magazines and newspapers. But it’s important to understand that the magazines and newspapers it sells aren’t Zinio-like replicas of the originals. The E-Ink display is only capable of providing a rough approximation of photos and other images, as shown by this TIME cover:
Worse, TIME’s interiors are plain-text only, making for a pretty drab experience no matter how good the articles are. The only new benefit the Kindle DX offers is more of that plain text on a page than with the little Kindle:
The good news is that the 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:
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