Kindle 2.0

This little device is on the market for a while and I was never tempted by it. But well I would like to share my experience.

Well, it looks nice but it also looks rather not sturdy enough to me. So I would be cautious about where I put it. Anyway what I was afraid about is the fact that it is still an electronic device and that the screen can't mimic a paper (It makes me sick to read something on PDA, Blackberry or Palm or whatever handheld device that comes to your mind). I have to say that looking at kindle's screen is ok BUT what I don't like are the flashes in between pages. Ok if you read a page and it takes you more than a minute to read then it is quite ok. But I have to say that going through a manual on Kindle is a pain for me. That gets to a problem that you can have. Kindle is not good for searching in the book - with that I mean looking for something in particular that you know that is somewhere here in the first third of the book for example. Finding a reference or something is a pain as well. It's slow in going through the pages and it makes my eyes and stomach hurt.

Anyway Kindle is good for reading books. You can either buy books via your Amazon account (if you did not buy it from Amazon you have to register the device by entering its serial number) or you can download them from somewhere and convert them to Kindle format or PDF. Converting is done by sending the files to your account, where it gets converted and is sent back to your Kindle via internet connection (via Wi-Fi or 3G). This actually costs about 0.1USD. Or you can just convert the file into PDF. With that you might have problems as it will shrink or enlarge the page to the screen and sometimes the letters are just to small. You can use the landscape layout to read the PDF which solved my problem. (But that also means that one page is separated in three parts and that means more blinking stuff for me.)

On Kindle you can create your own categories where you store your books and the capacity of the HDD is 4GB. There's about 3GB available to the user. Well, that seems a lot for books but for some it does not need to be. You can play Audio Books or mp3s from Kindle and that's something that can be big.

Kindle has in Experimental a web browser via which you can actually browse the internet. It works quite nice.

The keyboard is ok and you can type using both thumbs. Anyway you will most of the time be using the "next page" button which is located on both sides of kindle.

What I found good about it is the dictionary. When you want something translated you see it on the same page as the word you want translated. Good thing^^.

That's about it.
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It's lightweight, portable, looks great, you can put anything you like on it (no matter what book, newspaper, mp3s..), you can easily read blogs and newspapers on it, it has well done dictionary.

so if you travel a lot and read a lot this might be a solution for you.