Comments on: …First Kindle DX review

By: TSO

TSO — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 20:30:24 +0000

Would you go far as to say that the leap between K1 and K2 is greater than that btwn K2 and DX?

By: Steve

Steve — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 13:56:18 +0000

Sadly Amazon was not charging the $.10 per document for the first year. They decided to create good will by waiving the charge for early Kindle adapters. Unfortunately when people found out they could send documents to their Kindles for free the service got abused. As a result Amazon decided they had to start charging as planned, but raised the price from $.10 per document to $.15 per MB (rounded up as already pointed out.)

I can’t help think that if Amazon had simply done what they said and charged $.10 per document the price would not have had to be changed. It would have curtailed some abuse, and they would not have lost so much for the service. So in a way, the new pricing is the fault of both Amazon and Kindle users who abused the service.

By: tagold

tagold — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 19:52:53 +0000

Lack of ability to hack-in non-western Unicode fonts is mitigated by PDF support.
One can print say Cyrillic text to the virtual PDF printer with embed fonts option selected, and resulted PDF file will be readable with Kindle DX. That was actually one of the first things I tried with my KDX and it worked. There is now support for annotation/highlighting of such texts, but it is better then nothing.

By: Aevin

Aevin — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 18:11:11 +0000

I’m not sure if this is a recent change, or if I’m remembering things differently, but the Personal Document Conversion w/ Whispernet seems to have increased to $.15 per MB (rounded up). I thought it was supposed to be $.10 per document? The charge info can be found here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200321920&#fee

By: Brad

Brad — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 21:28:37 +0000

My accelerometer/inclinometer seems to be unresponsive too. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. I don’t know if I should live with it or give customer support a call.

By: LingMystic

LingMystic — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 07:17:13 +0000

So far, it’s been a bit of a wash. The PDF support (why I bought it) is great if the PDF is single-page-per-page 8.5×11, but double-page-per-page PDF or oddly-sized PDFs are a loss without zoom and scroll. Unfortunately, this is the nature of many/most academic PDFs, which are what I’m interested in. That’s a major failing for me.

Also, I think I vastly prefer the scoll wheel on the Kindle One to this five-way monstrosity. It seems very slow and awkward to use. For reading anything but PDFs, I think I definitely prefer the first Kindle. Similarly, the keyboard on the DX is really difficult for me to use.

All this, and I think my accelerometer/inclinometer is actually defective, as it’s frequently unresponsive to angle changes, and I have to go and set the orientation manually, even when in Auto. Truthfully, I’m considering just attempting to return it and to keep printing PDFs and reading with my Kindle One as I have in the past.

That said, the screen is nice, and the ability to read PDFs is similarly nice. I just wish the interface was pleasant and PDF support were better. Also, sub-folders would be wonderful too.

By: Jeff

Jeff — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 02:27:19 +0000

A key to good typography, which totally impacts readability, is the number of characters per line. For reflowing text documents, decreasing the column width might be a very good idea. But having that large DX screen should enable much better PDF viewing than the older Kindle. Looking forward to your test of PDF support in Kindle DX.

By: David Lang

David Lang — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 01:34:17 +0000

one possible reason for the ‘words per line’ setting is that for trained speed readers, it can be _much_ faster to read down a column of text if your eyes don’t have to scan back and forth to see the entire line. with a taller screen you can fit more text on a page, and therefor reduce the number of page turns that are needed to read a book (increasing your reading speed)