I’ve just received my new graphite Kindle 3 Reader along with Kindle Lighted Leather Cover. Both items were overnighted by Fedex for a nominal $3.99 a piece thanks to Amazon Prime. So now I can finally get started on this hands-on review of Amazon’s latest gadget.

Kindle 3 at a glance:

Amazon Kindle 3

Here are the highlights of Amazon’s new Kindle 3 eBook reader:

• Small and light  - 7.5″ x 4.8″ x 0.335″, 8.7oz. In fact it’s one of the smallest eReaders out there and the best one by features by size and weight ratio. Easily fits in a small purse or a coat pocket.
• Sharp and fast 6″ 600×800 eInk screen. The contrast ratio is measurably better (see Kindle screen contrast measurement) that in other eReaders. eInk screen is free of glare and can be read in direct sunlight. There are several options including Leather Cover with LED light and Clip-On Mighty Bright XtraFlex2.
• 3G + WiFi connectivity. Kindle 3 can download books and access Wikipedia via free 3G connectivity in more than 100 different countries. WiFi (when it’s available) allows faster download speeds and connectivity where GSM data is not available. In some countries including US you can also access any website on the Internet via free 3G coverage.
• No computer required. You can buy and download books from the device itself.
• Long battery life. Up to 1 month with wireless off. Up to 3 weeks with WiFi connectivity and up to 10 days with 3G connectivity. You can read as much as you like without having to worry about recharging.
• Text-To-Speech and fully accessible menus via Voice Guide let you listen to the book as it is read and make Kindle 3 a fully accessible device.
• 670,000+ modern books with majority priced under $9.99. These include 107 of 111 New York Times Bestsellers. 1,800,000+ older out-of-copyright books available for free. These include books by Mark Twain, Jane Austen, H. G. Wells and other famous and popular authors.
• First several chapters in any book are available as free sample.
• Books purchased in Amazon Kindle store can also be read on a variety of different devices and platforms including: PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad, Android and Blackberry.
• All books purchased from Amazon Kindle store can be shared among all devices connected to the same Amazon account and read simultaneously.
• Built-in dictionary for instantly looking up word definitions. Alternate dictionaries can also be installed. For example English-Russian dictionary to provide instant translations.
• Native support for PDF, MOBI, PRC, TXT, JPEG, PNG, GIF and BMP files. DOC(X) is supported via online conversion.
• Native support for Cyrillic (Russian), Traditional and simplified Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters.
• Kindle 3 supports Audible (an Amazon subsidiary) audio books and allows bookmarking and chapter navigation. Although it lacks a fully functional audio-player, Kindle can play DRM-free MP3 files as a background music for a book.
• Social features. You can annotate your books, newspapers and magazines and share your annotations and highlights via Twitter and Facebook.
• Kindle 3 features upgraded WebKit-based browser that lets you view almost any website on eInk screen.
• 2 great word games (Shuffled Row and Every Word) with more applications on the way.
• 4 gigabytes of built in memory that can store up to 3,500 books.

Please read on for in depth review of these features and how they compare to Kindle 2 and other eReaders.

Kindle 3 Unboxed:

As usually both cover and Kindle came in Amazon’s signature “frustration free packaging”. You can easily get to your merchandise just with your bare hands without having to use knives or scissors. It is a minor but nonetheless pleasant element.

Latest Generation Kindle 3 and Lighted Leather Cover Unboxed

Kindle 3 Ergonomics:

Kindle 3 Weight

As you can see on our eReader size comparison page, Kindle 3 is one of the smallest eReaders out there. It is also one of the lightest. Although Amazon states 8.7 ounces of weight, actual measured weight is 8.2 ounces. Weighting 8.2 ounces  you can hardly feel it in your hand. Adding another 8 ounces of Leather cover with light to that really feels like a crime. Personally I’m going to shelf the cover at home and only put it on the Kindle while travelling. Amazon really did a great job on the weight and compactness. While Kindle 2 was just the right size to fit into my coat pocket, Kindle 3 fits in it easily with some room to spare.

Power and volume buttons, along with headphone audio jack all moved to the lower edge of the device, leaving all other edges nicely clean. Charging light is now integrated into the power button. Overall this setup is very similar to the original first generation Kindle.

As far a new control layout goes, Lab126 somewhat dropped the ball here in my opinion. Kindle 2 was the ultimate one-handed reader. Jeff Bezos even made jokes about it when interviewed by the media. In Kindle 3, Amazon designers did away with the 5-way controller, replacing it with a 5 button setup that is located much lower. Paging buttons stayed on the same place but became much smaller.

Kindle 3 Symbols Menu

I’m a right-handed person. With Kindle 2 I could hold the device in my right hand and manipulate “Next page”, “Menu”, “Home” and even “Back” button along with the 5-way stick with my thumb. Unless I needed to type an annotation or search for text I never had to engage my left hand. With Kindle 3 paging buttons are still easy to use – you just need to hold the device the same way you did Kindle 2 and slightly rock your thumb to flip pages. Surprisingly I’ve found it easier to to hold Kindle 3 and flip pages with my left hand. 5 navigational buttons along with “Menu”, “Home” and  ”Back” are much harder to reach and manipulate with thumb. It’s not impossible but personally I prefer to hold the device in the left hand and use right hand when I need to look up a word or manipulate a menu.

Given the fact that 97% of time it’s the “Next page” button that you are pressing I would consider it a minor defect, but defect nonetheless.

Unfortunately I don’t have any southpaw friends to provide feedback on Kindle ergonomics for left-handed people so I would be more than interested in comments from my readers in this regard and I’ll surely include them in this and subsequent Kindle 3 reviews.

Alphanumeric keyboard lost the numeric row (same as Kindle DX) so now you have to combine the Alt button with upper “QWERTYUIOP” row to type numbers. Slash (/) button was also eliminated so now you need to press Sym-Right-Right-Right-Ok to produce this symbol. Character table invoked by the “Sym” button got a whole new row filled with digits giving you yet another way to type numbers. On Kindle 3 buttons seem to bulge from the device body slightly more than from Kindle 2, making them easier to press. It is a minor plus but a plus nonetheless.

According to this review, larger charging light is easier for partially color-blind people to read than smaller lights in earlier generation Kindles and other eReaders.

Kindle 3 Screen:

Kindle 3 features eInk Pearl screen. eInk screens don’t have any light source and only require small amount of power to change the picture. Static pictures can stay on the screen forever without draining the battery at all. Since eInk screens are reflective, they can be read from easily under direct sunlight just like regular paper book.

Amazon claims that Kindle 3 has “50% better contrast ratio that any other eReader” and it seems that this claim does have some merit. Although I don’t know which methodology Amazon used in their tests and I’m a amateur photographer rather than a professional colormetrist, I did some measurements of my own and it does look like Kindle 3 beats other eReader in terms of contrast.

Kindle 3 Screen Contrast Test

I took a sheet of office paper and cut a rectangular hole in it to do measurements. Then I created a picture that was half fully black and half fully white. I displayed the picture on several eReaders that I had and photographed both white and black sections of the image covered by paper in such a way that only hole and paper would be in the frame. To make sure that all pictures are created equal I disabled all automatics and post-processing in my DSLR and used flash in manual mode to get consistent lighting. For better accuracy I used 16 bit/color channel resolution. I then blurred pictures to eliminate noise and measured intensities of reference paper, black and white sections of eReader screen in Photoshop. Since light intensity of the same piece of paper differed by less than 1% on all pictures I assume that my measurements were accurate enough. I then calculated white and black intensities relative to reference paper intensity and relative white to black intensity of each reader that represents contrast.

As you can see Kindle 3 is a clear leader in the contrast front with white to black ratio of almost 11. While all eReaders produce comparable white intensities, it is black intensity that really differentiates them and defines contrast ratio. Kindle 3 clearly produces darkest blacks of all devices, followed by Kindle 2 and Nook. It’s white is not as bright as the one one produced by older generation of eInk screen found in Kindle 2 and Nook but overall it clearly wins.

I was quite a bit surprised by Nook performance since I actually expected it to outperform Kindle 2 in contrast department. When I picked it up in the store couple of months ago the first thing that struck me was sharpness and contrast of text. It still looks sharp to me so I guess that it has to with fonts and the way they are rendered on the screen.

Sony PRS-600 touch edition is a clear outsider here – no surprise. Adding touchscreen layer on top of eInk really ruins the image clarity. Now I have actual numbers to back it up.

The new Kindle 3 screen has the same resolution of 600×800 with the same 6″ diagonal, giving it the same 167ppi spatial resolution. This resolution is adequate for comfortable reading at any reasonable font size.

Amazon claims 20% faster page turns. While I wasn’t able to test and accurately measure this metric subjectively it does seem to be true when I compare Kindle 3 and Kindle 2 side-by-side.

Kindle 3 Battery:

Kindle 3 Battery

Although officially Kindle 3 battery is not user-replaceable, it’s very easy to pop the cover off (you just need a thin screwdriver or a knife). Kindle 3 comes with LICO S11GTSF01A 3.7V 1750 mAh Lithium Polymer battery. This is an upgrade compared to 1530 mAh battery by the same manufacturer found in Kindle 2.

According to Amazon it allows up to 1 month battery life with wireless off and up to 3 weeks with wireless on for  WiFi-only Kindle 3 and up to 10 days for WiFi + 3G Kindle.

Buy doing some simple math we can calculate average current drains of about 2.4 mA with wireless completely off, 3.5 mA when running on WiFi and 7.3 mA when running on 3G + WiFi.

Many people are wondering about what would cover with built-in LED light do to the battery life. Luckily I had a digital multimeter and a piece of wire handy so I was able to measure the drain current of the cover as well. It turned out to be 76.6 milliamperes. This by an order a magnitude larger than what Kindle 3 consumes even with wireless on. So with LED light on battery life is going to be between 20.85 and 22.15 hours of constant reading. This is about twice as long as 10 hour battery life of Apple iPad.

Even though the battery is not officially replaceable, it should not be a big problem. Since Kindle can go on weeks without a recharge, this means fewer recharge cycles per year and therefore more years of total battery life.

Another thing worth pointing out is the fact that Kindle 3 would use WiFi network whenever it is available and disable 3G. Depending on how power management is implemented in hardware in software it might be possible to get same 3 weeks battery life on 3G+WiFi Kindle if the device is within WiFi range most of the time.

Kindle 3 Font Options:

Kindle 3 Font Test

With the latest firmware Kindle 3 supports 8 font sizes, 3 typefaces, 3 line spacing settings and 3 line widths. Overall this gives you 168 different ways to display any text. I ran some tests to give get an idea how these settings differ by displaying “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” sentence over and over on the same page.

On default settings (Font size #3, regular typeface, large line spacing, default words per line) Kindle screen accommodates 221 words. Following table illustrates the effect of different font settings on the number of words per page:

While in my opinion “words per line” setting that was originally introduced on Kindle DX doesn’t make much sense on a small 6″ screen, other settings give users lost of ways to customize their reading experience.

When reading PDF files none of these options are available since fonts are embedded into the files themselves. However there is “contrast setting” with 5 possible values: “lightest”, “lighter”, “default”, “darker”, “darkest”. What it really does is control the weight (boldness) of the font. Is very useful for making small fonts readable without having to zoom into PDF or change screen orientation.

Kindle 3 PDF Support:

Kindle 3 PDF Viewer

Initially PDF native support was introduced in Kindle DX. Back then Kindle software lacked support for zoom and pan so large 9.7″ screen was the only way to deal with documents that are intended for letter size paper (due to the way PDF format works it may be impossible to reflow text in PDF files, although Sony PRS-600 seems to be quite good about it). Since then PDF support was backported to Kindle 2 and after that received several upgrades.

In Kindle 3 you can:

• Zoom and scroll/pan PDF files. One good alternative to zooming is changing screen orientation to landscape and using paging buttons to scroll the page up and down.
• Do dictionary lookups just like with regular books.
• Highlight and annotate PDF files. Although annotations can be shared via Twitter and Facebook users will only see your annotation text but not the portion of the document you’ve annotated. Perhaps Amazon will fix this issue in the future.
• Search within PDF file.
• Change font weight.

You still can’t use any external or internal document hyperlinks or use built-in table of contents. This can be somewhat alleviated by searching for chapter names or using “Goto page number” menu function. Hopefully hyperlinks are also on Amazon’s TODO list.

Overall I can say that compared to “fair” PDF support in Kindle 2, Kindle 3 has “good” PDF support that can become “excellent” some day.

Kindle 3 Wireless Options:

Historically Kindle has shipped with free 3G wireless connectivity. Initially it was available though Sprint CDMA network only in the US. In 2009 when International Kindle 2 was released, Amazon switched to AT&T GSM network with roaming agreements in more than 100 countries.

Kindle 3 comes in two flavors: WiFi Only and 3G + WiFi. WiFi only option is $50 cheaper, slightly lighter and gets one more week of battery life. WiFi + 3G Kindle users the same AT&T 3G GSM network with international roaming as international Kindle but will use protected and unprotected WiFi networks whenever they are available. AT&T bills Amazon around $0.15 per megabyte of downloaded data so it’s a reasonable step for Amazon to forgo this cost while providing users with higher download speeds.

I’ve tested Kindle 3 with AT&T 3G connection and in WiFi mode with my home wireless network and with Sprint EVO 4G in mobile hotspot mode. Every time it worked perfectly. Both 802.11B and 802.11G networks are supported.

People who have mobile hotspot capable smartphones (ex: Android-based phones) may opt for the cheaper $139 Kindle WiFi and still enjoy global wireless connectivity via their phone. Personally I opted for $50 upfront 3G fee for the added convenience always-on connectivity and not having to worry about phone battery charge (mobile hotspot drains phone battery really fast).

Amazon claims 1 week longer battery life for WiFi only Kindle with wireless on compared to 3G + WiFi version. However Kindle 3 would always prefer WiFi connection to 3G so if it is smart enough to completely power off 3G modem when it is not used 1 month uptime for Kindle 3G may also be possible if the device spends most of the time within WiFi range.

It’s also worth noting that there are no separate controls for WiFi and 3G. There is a single menu option “Turn Wireless On/Off” that controls both radios.

Kindle 3 Social Features:

Kindle 3 has the same set of social features as recently released Kindle DX Graphite. You can share highlights and annotations from the books that you read with your friends via Twitter and Facebook. This features also works in newspapers and magazines but not in blogs (it’s a pity since despite doing most of my work on computer I prefer to read blogs like TechCrunch on Kindle if possible)

On top of that Kindle has a kind of social network of its own. You can opt-in to share your book highlights with Amazon. This way passages highlighted by multiple people become highlighted in the book as you read it and made available online. For example you can check out the most highlighted passages from “Eat, Pray, Love” here.

Kindle 3 Web Browser:

Kindle 3 Browser Article Mode

Kindle 3 comes with new WebKit-based web browser that does a much better job at rendering websites than previous browser in Kindle 2. New browser is much faster, more standard compliant and generally better at displaying complex web pages.

When I previously compared Kindle 2 with Nook, Nook was a hands down winner in web-browser department. Websites loaded much faster and nicer than with Kindle 2. In fact some websites Kindle 2 failed to load at all.

Kindle 3 addressed this problem nicely. Previously I would only use Kindle 2 browser as a last resort (if my smartphone wasn’t available) for anything other than Wikipedia. With Kindle 3 I would have to admit that web-browsing is quite usable and fast. In fact with some websites larger screen gives Kindle an advantage over smartphones. I did several side-by-side tests with Nook and found that loading speed was almost exactly the same. It didn’t have any problems even with active javascript content like eReader size comparator.

Another killer feature is “Article Mode”. It is specifically tailored for blogs. When it is turned on Kindle strips away headers, sidebars etc and displays only article content from the page (including images). Since this mode takes away all fancy formating, paging back in forth is extremely fast.

Overall with proper browser, free unlimited 3G Internet and WiFi option Kindle is a clear leader among eReaders when it comes to web-browsing.

Other Kindle 3 Features:

Kindle 3 added native support for several ranges of Unicode characters, including Cyrillic (Russian), Traditional and simplified Chinese, Japanese and Korean. You no longer need to install hacks or convert your books to PDF to read them on Kindle. All you need to do is save text file in UTF8 encoding and copy it into Kindle documents folder. Hopefully Amazon will enable these characters in self-published books soon so international dictionaries including English-Russian dictionary can be properly published.

Kindle 3 Unicode Support (Russian, Chinese, Japanese)

Kindle 3 has 4GB of built-in flash memory with 3.3 gigabytes available for your books, documents, photos and MP3 files. This is an upgrade compared to 2GB in Kindle 2.

Audible audiobooks are supported just as they were in Kindle 2.

Kindle 3 retains all of Kindle 2 Easter eggs, including picture viewer, calculator, minesweeper and gomoku.

There are two word game apps available for Kindle: Shuffled Row and Every Word. More applications are on the way.

Kindle 3 doesn’t have an accelerometer like Kindle DX so page orientation needs to be changed manually.

Kindle 3 Lights and Covers

Kindle 3 is a very lightweight device. Even so accidental drops might break it and the screen is not resistant to scratches. So protective covers are recommended. Although one is not included with the device itself, Amazon offers two models in seven colors each:

Kindle Lighted Leather Cover has a built in LED light. Cover hinges are conductive so the light draws power from Kindle battery. Estimated battery life with the light on is around 21 hours. The cover generally gets good reviews on Amazon. Unfortunately it is quite heavy. At 8oz weight it doubles the weight of the device. Nice thing about this cover is that the light shuts off when Kindle goes to sleep so it will not drain the battery if you leave it on the table and forget to turn off the light.

If you just need the light and not the cover Mighty Bright XtraFlex2 might be the way to go for you. It weights under 3 ounces, runs off 3 AAA batteries and clips-on to almost anything (including Kindle). Although I don’t know exact battery life of this light I can say that I’ve had it for more than a year and it still runs on original Duracell batteries that came with it.

If you want cover but not the light, there is basic leather cover. It is roughly 1.5 ounces lighter, costs $25 less than the one with the light and does a great job protecting your Kindle from scratches and falls.

Kindle 3 Leather Covers

Be aware that Kindle 3 has a different cover hinge configuration from Kindle 2 so covers designed for Kindle will not work.

Kindle 3 Disassembled:

Seeing how easy it is to remove Kindle 3 cover since there are no parts attached to it either outside or inside at all I couldn’t resist the temptation to take it off and snap the following picture (click to see full resolution version).

Here’s a scoop of what I was able to see:

• Battery is 3.7V 1750 mAh 6,47Wh Li-Po  LICO S11GTSF01A branded for Amazon Kindle. Kindle 2 contained 1530 mAh battery so this is a slight upgrade.
• 3G modem is AnyDATA DTP-600W, FCC ID: P4M-DTP-600W, IC : 4594A-DTP600W.
• WiFi card is Atheros AR6102G.
• It uses Wolfson Microelectronics WM8960G stereo codec and 1W speaker and headphone driver chip.

At the moment I didn’t want to dig deeper since I didn’t want to risk accidentally ruining the device before this review is done. I promise to take a better look at what’s inside in the future.

Conclusion:

At $189 price point Kindle 3 is the best value for money eReader on the market. It is a third generation device and Amazon has addressed few issues and shortcomings that previous generations had. At the moment it has the best eInk screen among all eReaders that I’m aware of. It is a a well-polished device that is optimized for reading books and at that it excels. In addition to reading books Kindle 3 provides good experience for browsing the web (especially when one considers the fact that global Internet access is gratis from Amazon), listening to audio-books, and playing simple games.

At $139 Kindle WiFi with the same sharp and high-contrast screen and other features is a steal given wide availability of free WiFi internet worldwide.

While it has some potential for improvement (like any other device), issues like PDF table of contents support can be addressed by a software update in the future.

However don’t just take my word for it – check out what people are saying in their reviews.

Kindle 2 International with Unicode Fonts

As the image above implies I’ve updated the hack to work with the most recent versions of Kindle software: 2.5.2 and 2.5.3. The instructions and updated links can be found here: Kindle Unicode Font Hack.

I tested the hack with Kindle 2 US, Kindle 2 International and Kindle DX. Unfortunately I don’t have Kindle DX International to test it on but I see no reason why it would be any different there.

Enjoy!

Many of you have been asking and I wasn’t able to give you an answer. Well… now that 2.5.2 is available for everyone to download from Amazon.com website, it’s official. Amazon has fixed the tarbomb vulnerability in the update installer. So jailberaking and hacking the Kindle is not possible now unless you are willing to mess with hardware or have something like telnet or “unbrick”  hack (that doesn’t interfere with official updates) installed. If you do, then you should know your way around Kindle well enough to be able to replace fonts yourself. If you don’t then you’ll have to stick with reading Unicode on Kindle via PDF or figure out how to hack it for yourself.

As simple as UFH installation was, some people still bricked their devices with the old hack for one reason or another. So until a new method of jailbreaking the Kindle is found that is as simple as the old ones, I’m going to postpone UFH development.

Sorry, I wish I had better news for you.

There seems to be a small problem with the latest UHF update. The newest uninstaller doesn’t remove old versions of the hack. Since all my Kindle devices have software 2.3 now I can’t debug the issue. I’ve made old version of uninstaller available that should do the job:

• Kindle 2 (serial number starts with B002) – update_ufh_uninstall-k2.bin (old)
• Kindle 2 International (serial number starts with B003) – update_ufh_uninstall-k2i.bin (old)
• Kindle DX (serial number starts with B004) – update_ufh_uninstall-kdx.bin (old)

Sorry for the inconvenience.

This updated version of Kindle Unicode Fonts Hack works on all versions of Kindle software including the most recent 2.3 and installs on Kindle 2 US, Kindle 2 International and Kindle DX.

I’ve added more font combinations:

• GNU FreeFont – this hack uses GNU Free Fonts that come with Linux and are free to redistribute. All font styles are preserved (serif, sans-serif, mono-spaced, bold and italic) but these fonts only support Latin, Cyrillic characters and some others (click here for full coverage data). So if you are only interested in Russian books – this is the way to go. Otherwise this patch will do you little good. Here are download links:
  • Kindle 2 (serial number starts with B002) – update_ufh_gnufreefont_install-k2.bin
  • Kindle 2 International (serial number starts with B003) – update_ufh_gnufreefont_install-k2i.bin
  • Kindle DX (serial number starts with B004) – update_ufh_gnufreefont_install-kdx.bin

• GNU Free Fonts SansSerif (recommended for Cyrillic) - same fonts as before but SansSerif family is used instead of Serif. In my opinion it looks better. Bold and italic styles are preserved:
  • Kindle 2 (serial number starts with B002) – update_ufh_gnufreefont_sans_install-k2.bin
  • Kindle 2 International (serial number starts with B003) – update_ufh_gnufreefont_sans_install-k2i.bin
  • Kindle DX (serial number starts with B004) – update_ufh_gnufreefont_sans_install-kdx.bin

• Droid Fallback Fonts (recommened for Asian glyphs) - this hack uses open-source Droid fallback font that is part of Google Android platform. Unfortunately styles and typefaces are missing completely. You’ll only get regular Sans Serif. The upside is the broadest character support. It supports Cyrillic, Chinese, Japanese and a bunch of other languages. This font also looks very good on the Kindle screen (in my opinion way better than native Kindle fonts). This is the patch I currently have installed on my Kindle 2. Here are download links:
  • Kindle 2 (serial number starts with B002) – update_ufh_droid_install-k2.bin
  • Kindle 2 International (serial number starts with B003) – update_ufh_droid_install-k2i.bin
  • Kindle DX (serial number starts with B004) – update_ufh_droid_install-kdx.bin

• Droid Fonts with Styles – Same fonts as above but all families and styles are there. However Asian characters are not supported:
  • Kindle 2 (serial number starts with B002) – update_ufh_droid_styles_install-k2.bin
  • Kindle 2 International (serial number starts with B003) – update_ufh_droid_styles_install-k2i.bin
  • Kindle DX (serial number starts with B004) – update_ufh_droid_install-kdx.bin

• Droid Fallback with Styles SansSerif – Same as above but Serif fonts are replaced with Sans Serif because I believe it is more readable on Kindle screen:
  • Kindle 2 (serial number starts with B002) – update_ufh_droid_styles_sans_install-k2.bin
  • Kindle 2 International (serial number starts with B003) – update_ufh_droid_styles_sans_install-k2i.bin
  • Kindle DX (serial number starts with B004) – update_ufh_droid_sans_install-kdx.bin

Visit the Kindle Unicode Fonts Hack page for detailed instructions.

I’ve create Unicode Font Hack that also works on Kindle 2 International. I’ve also reorganized the files to minimize download times. Each device/font combination can now be downloaded as separate file. That file would contain only update binaries. Source code for all binaries can be downloaded separately. I’ve updated the hack page accordingly. You can find instructions as well as more detailed information there.

I’ve made the following changes to the hack:

• Removed browser only hack since it didn’t add much value – if you still want it you’ll need to build it from the sources yourself.
• Changed the uninstaller so that it removes extra font files completely as some of you have requested this feature.
• Since droid hack uses the same font, rather than making multiple copies I’m using symlinks now so the hack uses less disk space on Kindle.

Here are installation instructions:

1. Download one of the following files:
   1. Droid fonts: this is an open-source font that comes from Android Google OS. This font looks quite nice and supports Asian characters. However it only comes in sans serif style:
      • Kindle 2 (software version 2.0.*) - update_ufh_droid_install-k2.bin
      • Kindle 2 International (software version 2.2.*) - update_ufh_droid_install-k2i.bin (you need to jailbreak you Kindle first – read on to find out how)
      • Kindle DX (software version 2.1.*) - update_ufh_droid_install-kdx.bin
   2. Liberation fonts. These fonts come from RedHat linux and are open-source. Personally I don’t find them as nice as droid. It doesn’t support Asian characters. However it does support all 3 font styles – serif, sans serif and mono-spaced.
      • Kindle 2 (software version 2.0.*) - update_ufh_liberation_install-k2.bin
      • Kindle 2 International (software version 2.2.*) - update_ufh_liberation_install-k2i.bin (you need to jailbreak you Kindle first – read on to find out how)
      • Kindle DX (software version 2.1.*) - update_ufh_liberation_install-kdx.bin
2. If you have international version of Kindle 2 you need to jailbreak it first:
   1. Connect your Kindle to PC via the USB cable.
   2. Download this file: update_freekindle-k2i.bin
   3. Copy it to the root directory of your Kindle.
   4. Press Home. Press Menu. Select Settings. Press Menu. Select Update Your Kindle. Select OK.
   5. The update WILL fail. This is expected. However from now on you will be able to install custom Kindle updates.
3. Connect your Kindle to PC via the USB cable.
4. Copy update package that corresponds to your device to to the root directory of your Kindle.
5. Press Home. Press Menu. Select Settings. Press Menu. Select Update Your Kindle. Select OK.
6. The update will install, Kindle will restart and when it does – new fonts are going to be in effect. Please not that for International Kindle it will take some time before the installation progress bar moves as font files are large and it takes a long time for Kindle to verify the update signature.

To uninstall:

1. Connect your Kindle to PC via the USB cable.
2. Download  and copy uninstall package that corresponds to your device to to the root directory of your Kindle.
   • Kindle 2 (software version 2.0.*) - update_ufh_uninstall-k2.bin
   • Kindle 2 International (software version 2.2.*) -update_ufh_uninstall-k2i.bin
   • Kindle DX (software version 2.1.*) -update_ufh_uninstall-kdx.bin
3. Press Home. Press Menu. Select Settings. Press Menu. Select Update Your Kindle. Select OK.
4. The update will install, Kindle will restart and when it does – old fonts will be used and there will be no trace of the hack in the Kindle file system. So official updates will install once again.

If you would like to customize the fonts – you can do so by downloading the hack sources and modifying them. I have to warn you that this is risky business though. It may be a good idea to install the antibrick hack before you proceed.

When I was first working on Unicode Font Hack for Kindle 2 I bricked mine by messing up the fonts configuration. This prevented Java GUI from starting up so I had to way to install an update that would reverse the change.

While this hack will not fix your already bricked Kindle it will give you a chance to unbrick yours in the future. All it does is it installs a startup script that would scan check system directory for exec.sh and execute commands that are in there. File is then renamed to exec.sh.done to avoid infinite executions. This will give you a chance to run some commands even if Java GUI doesn’t start for one reason or another. It will also give you ability to run commands on your Kindle without having to roll updates for every command, use serial console or USB networking hack.

Since this gives you the ability to run any commands on your Kindle this surely gives you the ability to irreversibly brick it as well. So if you don’t know your way around Linux I don’t recommend you install it at all.

That being said, the hack can be downloaded here: kindle_antibrick.zip

All you need to do is copy appropriate  (update_antibrick-k2.bin for Kindle 2, update_antibrick-kdx for Kindle DX and update_antibrick-k2i for Kindle International) file into root directory of Kindle USB drive just like any other hack. It will also copy small sample exec.sh into system directory. Upon successful installation this script will create a file antibrick-success.txt in the root folder.

If you are doing this on Kindle 2 international you need to jailbreak your Kindle first.

Since it doesn’t change any existing files it is not intrusive in regard to official Amazon updates and will not prevent them from being installed.

update_antibrick_remove-*.bin files remove the hack. Once again you should use the file that corresponds to your device version.

I’ve decided to publish this before I publish the updated Unicode Fonts hack so that people who would want to modify the hack may install this first.

I was quite close to publishing similar findings myself but Jean-Yves Avenard beat me to it. It is now possible to create custom updates for International Kindle that runs firmware 2.2.* Fortunately there is no need for hardware changes…

A little background information first. A while back Igor Skochinsky found serial console connector on Kindle 1 and reverse engineered scripts that Kindle uses to update it’s firmware. Since Amazon is paying for it’s wireless traffic they don’t push full firmware dumps as updates but rather compressed linux patches that only change the things that need to be changed and are relatively small. In Kindle 2 same scripts were used. The only thing that changed was device ID. This was to safeguard against installing update for wrong Kindle device rather than to prevent custom update installation altogether. Kindle DX was a similar story.

However it all changed when Kindle 2 International came out. There was a device ID change as well but updates still failed to install. Using debug commands that still worked (you need to type then in the home screen search box – they are quite harmless will not break your Kindle):

• ;debugOn
• ;dumpMessages

Amonng other housekeeping messages it returned the folloing lines:

091021:102422 EXT3 FS on mmcblk0p1, internal journal
091021:102422 system: I _otaupexec:def:processing update /mnt/us/update_tool.bin
091021:102422 system: I _otaupexec:def:version is “FC02″
091021:102422 system: I _otaupexec:def:update image checksum OK
091021:102422 system: E _otaupexec:def:signature does not exist for “tool.sh”
091021:102422 system: E _otaupexec:def:signature verification failed

So it looked like Amazon was signing update packages now. Worst case scenario would have been usage of asymmetric encryption keys like RSA that would be impossible to break until we have working full-scale quantum computers. Best case would be Amazon using something simple – like tar file scrambling that they are using to “encrypt” the whole update file.

I was trying to break into the Kindle via serial console that can be exposed by sliding the top plastic cover off the device but fried my Kindle in the process.

While I was waiting for the new device to arrive, mobileread.com member clarknova suggested using a tarbomb to break into the new Kindle. He assumed that new Kindle would still use the old code to extract files from the update before verifying the signatures. It proved to be true. A tarbomb exploits the fact that linux tar would extract anything that is given to it and might put it somewhere where package receiver didn’t intent it to go. For example older versions would honor relative paths, so if tarball contained file ../../etc/rc5.d/S00kill-code and most likely user would try to unpack the file in /home/username, the malicious file would go into /etc/rc5.d/ and get executed on the startup. While version of tar that is installed on Kindle discards parent directory references, it allows to unpack a symlink that points anywhere in the filesystem. This allowed to craft an update that would still fail to install but in the process would deposit a startup script that would unlock further access to Kindle internals.

Unfortunately Amazon did use the asymmetric encryption to sign the packages. Fortunately there is a very nice way around. Kindle doesn’t use just one key to verify the signature – it enumerates all key files in /etc/uks directory and if any of the keys yields a positive signature validation – the file passes the test. So Jean-Yves Avenard created a tarbomb that would add extra public key to that directory. He also modified Igor’s script to use corresponding private key to sign all the files in the package.

Nice thing about this mod is that it doesn’t change any files in Kindle filesystem, it just adds. So it will not cause checksum conflicts when installing official Amazon updates in the future. However if you use this jailbreak mod to install other updates like Unicode Font Hack, screensaver, savory, etc that DO change files then standard rules apply – official updates will fail and you’ll need to revert the hacks, install official update manually and then reinstall the hacks. Although I doubt that we’ll see many official Amazon updates anytime soon. I’ll make a separate post on this topic at some other time.

I’m pretty sure that in the next version of the device (International Kindle DX perhaps or whatever comes next), Amazon will fix this vulnerability and serial console might be required to install things on Kindle or perhaps some other security exploit. But for now here are specifics:

You can download the “jailbreak” update here. I’ve tested it on my Kindle and it works perfectly. It also contains the updated script to create your own packages. However I would strongly advise you to do it only if you really-really need to, really-really know that you are doing and are willing to brick your device. Several people were known to irreversible brick their Kindle eBook readers by experimenting with them. I bricked two so far trying to create unicode font hack – one US Kindle 2 a while back another Kindle 2 International recently.

So if you are not sure about what are you doing – stick to pre-canned hacks from verified sources that have been tested to work and have uninstallers available. These are relatively safe though again there is always a chance of something going wrong and hacking the Kindle absolutely does void the warranty.

I’ve tested the pre-canned screensaver hack that can be downloaded here and it does work perfectly.

To avoid having to jailbreak Kindle multiple times and creating potentially conflicting hacks I recommend to all Kindle modders out there to use Jean-Yves Avenard’s packager and private/public key pair for creating Internaional Kindle hacks. I’m going to use it for Unicode Font Hack myself.

Right after publishing this post I’m going to reorganize the Unicode Font Hack a bit and release a new version for all Kindle versions including the international one. Stay tuned!

RS-232 to TTL converter for Kindle

If you were wondering why there were no posts lately – I’ve been busy trying to come up with a way to install Unicode Font Hack on Kindle 2 International. Rather than ordering ready-made USB-RS232-TTL converter I’ve decided to have some fun with little hardware project and create one myself.

Unfortunately I’ve short-circuited something within Kindle when connecting wires to the serial console and pretty much bricked the unit. This is yet another reminder to people that you shouldn’t try to hack something like Kindle unless you are willing to brick it.

Right now I’m waiting for the next specimen to arrive as I’m determined to make Unicode Font Hack to work and make International Kindle truly international.

I bricked one Kindle a while back when I was creating the original Unicode Font Hack and succeeded on the second attempt. I hope that with international Kindle this will also be the case…

The Kindle is great for what it does, but it is by design somewhat limited to Amazon’s vision.  I’ve written on this blog before about allowing third party developers on the Kindle.  It looks like with the upcoming holiday season, talk over whether Amazon should release an SDK has started again.

New York Times makes the argument that since Amazon won’t likely release any new hardware (Both the Kindle 2 and DX are new enough that they’ve never been holiday gifts), it may be beneficial for them to find some new way to innovate before the holidays.  Creating an SDK where anyone could make and sell applications would not only increase the Kindle’s possibilities, but also give it a sort of iPhone recognition for innovation.

Of course, Amazon hasn’t already done this for a reason.  Perhaps over the worries of the publishers, or fears of piracy that could result from opening up the ecosystem, Amazon has not allowed third parties into the Kindle.  But here is where the iPhone example really applies.  iPhone apps undergo a nearly draconian review process, yet the iPhone and its apps continue to be a commercial success.  Amazon could easily decide to create a Kindle app marketplace where they vetoed any programs that, say, abused the wireless or allowed ePub on the device.  Some people would definitely gripe about the restrictions, but the sdk would still be an overall success.  Like the NYTimes article suggests, apps could be created for medical or other specialized niches.  The apps would be in high enough demand and would still be okay with Amazon.

One easy entry into Kindle apps could be board games like chess, go, checkers, monopoly, etc. These can be computationally light, especially if you are playing against the Internet server or another human, cause minimal wireless traffic and look well on Kindle’s eInk display. Right now there are two games on Kindle DX – minesweeper and Gomoku. More can be easily added – either free or for a charge. The ecosystem need not be as open as iPhone from the start and can still bring Kindle success. Lets not forget that even for iPhone it took a year for App store to materialize.

Will this really happen? In my opinion it’s a coin toss. Amazon has to come up with something to generate some Kindle buzz this holiday season when competition is stepping on it’s heels. And I’m pretty sure they will. But it might not be an app store.

Also, just wanted to say thanks to the New York Times for linking to Blog Kindle.  Hello any new readers!

Jesse Vincent who is responsible for a number of Kindle hacks in the past (such as Savory and tethering Kindle 2) managed to get Ubuntu Linux running on the Kindle 2.  Since one branch of the popular distro is ported to run on the ARM architecture that Kindle is based on, it seems like it was should have been possible to run a generic Linux version on the device. Jesse proved it to be true. He has actually been at it for quite a while, having run xdaliclock on the Kindle months ago. It seems that recently he was able make most of the Kindle hardware (like 5-way controller) work.

Hypothetically, there is no limit to what other software could be installed.  It’s even plausible that at some point in the future something like this could become more widespread.  If someone likes the Kindle but not Amazon’s platform, they could install some community supported Kindle OS that was more to their liking.  People already jailbreak iPhones; this could be the Kindle equivalent.

I’ve published the script that I’ve been using personally for quite some time to make plain text files that were preformatted to specific page width nicely reflowable on Kindle and other eBook readers (I’ve tested it with Sony PRS-505). It can also strip any HTML tags and convert between character encodings.

This should make downloading books from websites like lib.ru and gutenberg.org easier for some for some people. More information about how to use the tool as well as download link can be found here.

I’ve also created a summary page for all Kindle hacks and tools that I currently know of. Feel free to let me know if some information needs to be added to updated.

I’ve been traveling in the UK for over a month now. One major pain point I encountered with Kindle is downloading periodicals and books to the device without WhisperNet connctivity. It’s one thing when you are in the US, you click on a book and within a minute or two it appears on your Kindle. However if you have to get the file on the device manually, number of clicks increases. As for periodicals, you actually have to manually download it to the device every day. It’s almost as if you had to go to the store for your newspapers rather than have it delivered by subscription.

Being lazy as I am, I put together some scripts that automatically login to amazon.com, check for new content and download it to folder on my PC. Once I connect my Kindle it is automatically synced with the device.

I realized that this software might be useful even for people who don’t travel abroad:

• Maybe you don’t have Sprint WhisperNet connectivity in your area
• Or you would like to automatically back up all the digital content you purchase from Amazon
• Or you want to improve battery life by turning the 3G radio off in Kindle and dock it instead.

I can’t release these scripts to the public right now for a couple of reasons:

1. They are very crude and are not meant to be used by anyone but me right now. They even have my amazon.com login information hard-coded into them.
2. They might be considered to be a violation of amazon.com EULA since they can be considered to be a “robot accessing the website”

All this can be fixed. However before investing some effort in making this software usable and getting the OK from Amazon I would like to know if anyone would be interested in this stuff and actually use it. If I see enough interest in the project I’ll release it to the public freely and open-source it if there will be no objections from Amazon.

Please respond in the poll below or in the comments.

Kindle DX cant download PDF (by nirmalpatel.com)

Although Amazon added native support for PDF to Kindle DX they didn’t add the ability to download these directly from the Internet. I believe that this feature was left out deliberately rather than by chance because Amazon pays Sprint $0.12 for each megabyte downloaded. In the case of PDFs cost of downloading PDFs to users for free can easily top profits from book and device sales because as we know Amazon’s profit is not that big as they are trying to grab as much market as possible.

Recently Nirmal Patel created a hack for Kindle DX (based on the source code of UFHack) that enables direct PDF downloads. Since at the moment I’m outside US and don’t have WhisperNet coverage I can’t truly test it however I looked at the hack – it’s very simple and should work.

It installs and uninstalls just as any other Kindle hack:

1. Download update_install_download_pdfs_from_browser.bin to install the hack or update_uninstall_download_pdfs_from_browser.bin to uninstall it.
2. Connect your Kindle to PC using USB cable and copy the file to root folder.
3. Press “Menu”, select “Settings”, press “Menu”, select “Update Your Kindle” and then select “Ok”.
4. You Kindle will reboot and changes will be applied.

PDF download hack is compatible with other hacks such as unicode fonts hack and screensaver hack.

While I congratulate Nirmal Patel on this hack I do urge you to enjoy it responsibly and don’t abuse Kindle’s 3G connection because should this become a significant financial liability for Amazon they can easily start signing update packages with strong cryptographic keys and this would prevent any other hacks from working altogether.

Also keep in mind that when you download stuff using your Kindle, Amazon knows:

1. What exactly and when you download since it all goes through their proxy server.
2. Where you live since your address is in your account information.
3. Where you are right now since Kindles can triangulate their position based on cell towers with accuracy of several hundred feet.
4. Your credit card number since you have it on file so you can buy Kindle books.

Folks at mobileread.com have updated their screen saver hack to work with Kindle DX. It allows you to replace default screen saver images (mostly of famous writers) that appear when Kindle goes into sleep mode with any set of images of your own choosing.

You can download binaries and source code here. Installation is very similar to other Kindle “feature enhancing” hacks:

Instructions for use:

1) Plug your Kindle DX into your computer.

2) Copy “update_DX_screensaverhack-install.bin” to the root of your Kindle DX.

3) Optional Steps:

3a) Change directories to the “system” folder.

3b) Create a new folder called “screen_saver”

3c) Place any 824×1200 PNG image files into the system\screen_saver folder that you just created.

6) Unplug your Kindle DX.

7) Press the “Menu” button on your Kindle DX and select “Settings.”

8) At the Settings page press “Menu” again and select “Update Your Kindle.”

9) When the “update” is done your Kindle DX will reboot and you are done.

If you choose not to do step 3, the system will create the system\screen_saver folder for you and place the default screen savers in it. You can then remove or replace these, or mix them with your own — it’s up to you.

To go back to the default Kindle DX screen savers:

1) Plug your Kindle DX into your computer.

2) Copy “update_DX_screensaverhack-uninstall.bin” to the root of your Kindle DX.

3) Unplug your Kindle DX.

4) Press the “Menu” button on your Kindle DX and select “Settings.”

5) At the Settings page press “Menu” again and select “Update Your Kindle.”

6) When the “update” is done your Kindle DX will reboot and you are done.

More Information:

You can change images at any time, but you must reset your kindle for them to appear (press and hold the slider for 15 seconds). If there are no images then a blank screen will be shown when you go into sleep mode.

As with the K2, JPG/PNG/GIF files all work . You can use JPG, PNG, GIF, any size, although obviously 824×1200 works best. Smaller images are anchored in the upper left corner.

If you would like to restore the original screen savers without removing the hack, simply delete the screen_saver folder and reset your kindle, and the folder will be recreated with the original images in it.

Any official kindle DX updates that patch the file will fail (gracefully) if this is installed (ie. 2.1 to 2.1.1). Use the remove procedure, to restore the default screen savers, then apply the official update, and all will be well.

This hack is compatible with Unicode Font Hack and you can install and uninstall both independently of each other.

Fine folks at the-ebook.org (translated version) have found a way to mod Igor’s python script so it can create valid custom updates for Amazon Kindle DX. I’ve compiled Kindle Unicode Font hack with the updated tool and verified that hacks work on my Kindle DX. Everything works fine – there are Unicode characters in both books and basic web, hack installs and uninstalls just fine and is safe to use.

Just as before there are 2 versions of the hack: one based on liberation fonts that have fewer international characters (no Asian characters) but preserve serif styles and one with droid fonts that has more characters but turns everything into sans-serif.

I have updated Unicode Fonts Hack page with new download links and instructions. Enjoy!

Kindle DX Unicode Font Hack

It has been a while since Kindle 2 was disassembled and now Rapid Repair did the same to Kindle DX.

Kindle DX Disassembled

Here’s the scoop of Kindle DX components:

• The battery is 3.7V Li-Pol 1530mAh. Battery capacity is identical to one used in Kindle 2. MC13783VK5 is used as battery management chip also identical to Kindle 2.
• CPU is MCIMX31LDVKN5D M91E CTAK0915B by Freescale Semiconductors which is the next revision of the one used in K2. Is uses ARM11 microprocessor core. It can run on core clock frequency of up to 533Mhz.
• Samsung 916 K4X1G323PC-8GC3 EMA188A5 is a 128 Megabyte mobile DDR SDRAM chip. This is the same as in Kindle 2
• Samsung 840 K4M28323PH-HG75 AAH055BE is a 16 Megabyte mobile SDR SDRAM chip. Based on the fact that it’s located right next to Epson eInk controller chip (see below) I would dare to guess that it’s used as “framebuffer” memory. I could be wrong though.
• eInk controller is Epson D135211B1 F09090125.
• Flash chip is Samsung 907 KMBLG0000M-B998. It is 5 Gigabyte MOVI NAND + NAND + MCU.

Except for the flash and slightly upgraded CPU all other components are identical to ones used in Kindle 2. That’s why Amazon was able to release it so soon after K2 was released.

Ok, lets pick up where we left off: My Kindle DX has just arrived…

Unboxing Kindle DX

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Kindle DX power up

Post #301…

Exterior & Ergonomics

Kindle DX is much larger and slightly heavier than Kindle 2. In fact If you put K2 on top of DX, K2 would be almost the same size as DX’s screen. It’s still comfortable to hold and flip pages, at least for right handed people like me. Of course it works upside down and it’s usable this way but I will pass on making a judgment on how comfortable such setup would be for left-handed people. One thing for sure – alphanumeric keyboard is not usable this way. Landscape mode is comfortable. As Kindle is rotated, 5-way controller is automatically remapped so left remains left and right remains right.

Amazon leather cover now comes with two magnets to keep itself shut. If you are still using floppy disks from the previous millennium you shouldn’t put them next to Kindle DX if you are using the cover.

Kindle DX vs. Kindle 2

Screen and fonts

It’s large. That’s for sure. 824×1200 pixels. It seems to update faster than Kindle 2 and whiles seems to be slightly lighter. There’s minimal ghosting sometimes just as on my second K2. The first K2 that was bricked by airplane didn’t have ghosting problem. Screensaver pictures seem to be the same as in K2 but upscaled and they do look gorgeous on the big screen. Fonts seem darker. So looks like Amazon took complaints about low contrast in Kindle 2 seriously and decided to address them. Spatial resolution is slightly lower – 150ppi comared to 167 in Kindle 2.

I’ve downloaded samples of some of the “books that look good on Kindle DX’s large screen“… Really they should be called “books that would have looked great on Kindle DX should have looked great on Kindle DX if images were not downsampled to lower resolution… I’ve checked 3 books and none looked as good as screensaver images. You could clearly see that illustrations in these books are much lower resolution than the screen. Hopefully this will get fixed as some point.

There are 7 font sizes just as in previous models. However the smallest font on Kindle DX seems to correspond to second smallest on K2. I can’t say for sure because I have Droid fonts installed on my K2 so that I can read Cyrillic. When font size dialog is invoked there are 2 additional options there that are specific to DX: “Words Per Line” and “Screen Rotation”. The second one is pretty much self-explanatory: you can explicitly select one of the four rotations or set it auto and let the accelerometer control it. “Words Per Line” really controls left and right margin width. Three available options are: default, fewer and fewest. At the moment I don’t quite understand the use of it. If I would want smaller screen area I’d just use K2. As this option is changed inline pictures as downscaled as well.

Screen rotation

Works as advertised – the image rotates as you rotated the device. Refresh time is good. Changing scren orientation is as fast as flipping a page.

Kindle DX Landscape

Keyboard

Keyboard layout is QWERTY. Numeric row is merged with top letter row. To enter numbers you need to hold the “Alt” button. If you just need to enter one digit, you can press “alt” and digit in sequence (“alt” is “sticky” just likethe “shift” button). On DX buttons stick out more and are harder to press. Overall I found K2 keyboard more comfortable and easy to use than DX. Except “Next page” button being larger on DX, buttons on the right edge of the device are identical. 5-way controller stick is higher on DX.

PDF support

Kindle DX relies on it’s large screen to display PDF files “as is”, without re-flowing the text (which would be next to impossible with PDF since the format lacks any concept of paragraphs or text continuity).  The only way to zoom that I could find is to switch to landscape mode. It’s not such a big problem because most PDF files that people would want to read are preformatted for either Letter or A4 page size and Kindle DX screen is comparable in size to these formats.

Although there is concept of pages in PDF and you can navigate to any given page, both internal and external links in PDF files are disabled. Structured table of contents that is present in some PDF files is not usable either.

Graphically PDF files look fine and crisp. Rendering time is also good. It usually takes around 5 seconds to open the file initially and after that pagination speed is the same as when reading ebooks.

It’s not possible to download PDF files to your Kindle via WhisperNet. Most likely this is because Amazon pays 12 cents per megabyte to Sprint while keeping Internet connection free for Kindle owners. Given decent support that Kindle DX has for PDF files, abundance of PDF files on the Internet that people would like to download and read and relatively large size of these files it wouldn’t be a good idea for Amazon to enable such downloads.

It so happens that in my past life I spent a lot of time writing software that would process PDF files. Some time later I’ll run a comprehensive test of PDF support in Kindle DX and publish the results here.

Basic Web

Web browsing seems to be that same as on Kindle 2. “Advanced mode” is now called “Desktop mode’”. Basic mode is still much faster and usable than desktop mode. I tried to render BlogKindle.com in desktop mode and DX actually rendered it quite well. The only problem I could see was the lack of PNG transparency support.

Kindle DX Basic Web

9 inch screen definitely makes browsing a better experience.

Text-to-Speech

There are seemingly no changes in this feature. Funny thing that I’ve noticed as I experimented with it that female voice seems to have trouble pronouncing word USB. With male voice turned on is sounds much more natural.

Software

Apart from PDF support, changes to font size dialog, picture viewer mentioned above and additional game mentioned below Kindle software remains the same. Kindle DX comes out of the box with firmware version: 2.1 (337560062). Source code for Kindle DX is already published by Amazon and I’ll take a look at it. What seems important is that it has a separate section for Kindle DX sources code. On this basis I would speculate that next version of software for Kindle 2 is going to be 2.0.4, for Kindle DX it’s going to be 2.1.1. These will come from separate branches of code so I wouldn’t hope too much for PDF support being ported to Kindle 2 any time soon.

Hacking

Unfortunately Kindle DX was unresponsive  to the “old way hacking”. When I created a small “update” using Igor’s tool to dump the system log along with full directory listing to the root of Kindle drive the “Update Your Kindle” menu item remained disabled. Either Amazon has changed the format of the update files or they’ve come up with some way to digitally sign them to prevent hacking. Either way this means no unicode fonts for Kindle DX for the time being :(

Easter Eggs

I did a quick check on Kindle 2 easter eggs.

• Minesweeper is still there. It’s accessible by pressing Alt–Shift-M in the home screen. If you press G after minesweeper is started you can play GoMoKu (it’s like tic-tac-toe but on a large board and the goal is to get 5 in a row). Kindle is actually a very good GoMoKu player. I played it twice and so far the score is 1-1 even though human player always gets the first turn.
• Picture viewer is also there. To activate it connect Kindle via USB cable to your PC and create “pictures” folder in Kindle USB disk. Create subfolders there and copy pictures. Subfolders will become “book” names and pictures will be pages. JPG, PNG and GIF files are known to be supported. Once you’ve copied the files, disconnect the USB cable and press Alt-Z in the home screen – you should see your picture folders among books now. Scaling options have moved from the main menu to font-size dialog. Kindle DX will never try to stretch image to fit the screen but it can downscale to either fit width, height or screen. You can also display image at actual size and use 5-way controller to navigate the image. Screen rotation is also supported.
• Symbol keyboard shortcuts are gone since numeric row is merged with the top letter row.
• Hidden settings are still there. Typing “411″ and “611″ (using the alt-key) open corresponding settings pages.

Conclusions

Kindle DX is a nice device. Perhaps it’s not as much better as people hoped it would be but Kindle 2 sets the bar quite high. For day-to-day book reading I would still recommend Kindle 2 because of greater portability. If you can’t get by without PDF support and don’t want to use Savory hack (that would add similar or better level support than what’s available in 2.1) – Kindle DX is right for you. Hopefully with time there will be digital media that would take advantage of Kindle DX’s large screen.

Stay tuned for more detailed reviews, second impressions etc…

To view ePub of PDF files on your Amazon Kindle normally you would need to use Amazon email conversion service (either free of $0.10 per document) or you could convert documents on your PC using Mobipocket Creator. Well, not anymore…

Jesse from “Massively Parallel Procrastination” blog has created a Savory hack that adds almost native support for these formats to your Amazon Kindle. Installing this hack does two things:

1. It becomes possible to download PDF and ePub files from Kindle browser (normally all unsupported file-types are blocked)
2. One PDF or ePub file is dropped into /documents folder background conversion process is started automatically and after some time a converted document appears in it’s place.

I installed and tested it and it took just under 2 minutes to convert project Gutenberg version of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”. There were some formatting flaws but overall book converted well.

This hack is fully reversible. There is an uninstaller provided. However it should be noted that because of the way uninstaller currently works, if you have other hacks installed (like unicode hack or screensaver hack) it can potentially partially revert these as well if they were installed after Savory. So for now it’s safer to uninstall in the reverse order of how you installed hacks.

As with all other Kindle hacks it should be used with care because although tested by many people (myself included) it can potentially brick your device. Also having this hack installed will prevent official Amazon updates from installing so you’ll need to uninstall it and the install Amazon update manually.

This makes Kindle even more PC-independent than it was to begin with. And this is good. Personally I believe that PC-independent gadgets are the way of the future. Just look at how successful iPhone is (I only need to tether mine to upload new audiobooks and flash new firmware). This is because most people don’t wan’t anymore just to use computers for the sake of using computers but to get done things they need done in their everyday lives and the simpler – the better.

Patches were tested by several volunteers and all results were positive. The patch works and doesn’t cause any problems. You can now read books on your Amazon Kindle 2 in Russian, Chinese, Japanese and probably number of other languages.

Currently I’m releasing hack with two different fonts: Liberation that comes from RedHat Linux and Droid that comes from Google Android project. Both fonts are open-source and they are the best ones I could find that suit the needs of this hack. Finding good fonts was much harder than creating the hack itself.

Instructions and download links can be found here. Please-please-please-please-please do be very-very-very-very-very careful if you decide to experiment with adding your own fonts to the hack. If you find good free or reasonably priced fonts that work – please let me know – I’ll test them and make more versions of the hack available here and give you proper credit. Please spread the word about this hack as it will increase chances of someone finding better fonts that can be used with it.

Here are some screenshots of what Kindle 2 with hacked fonts looks like:

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I would like to thank John, Ted and some other folks for helping me test this patch. Another big thank you goes to Igor who created the python script that creates Kindle 2 update packages.

I’ll now shift my attention to figuring out creating custom recovery mode updates. Once this is done – I’ll have much more freedom in messing with fonts and other settings without fear of bricking my Kindle 2.

Update: Testing is completed. You can download release version of the hack here: Kindle Fonts Hack.

After quite a bit of tweaking I was able to create a patch that replaces default Kindle 2 fonts with ones that support wider range of Unicode characters. I was able to test it on Cyrillic texts in particular. I believe that any characters can be displayed – it’s just a matter of picking correct TTF fonts. The patch works in books and in web-browser as you can see from the screenshots. Patch is also fully reversible. I’ve tried installing and removing it several times and my Kindle is working fine.

I plan to make this patch available here on this website for anyone to download. However before I do so I would like to have it properly tested by volunteers. If you would like to be on the front-line of Kindle hacking – drop a comment here and I’ll email you the patch and the instructions. Volunteers will be honorably mentioned in the post containing the final patch. Although I’ve tested this patch to the best of my abilities and as you can see from the screenshots – it works, I can’t guarantee anything and if your device ends up being bricked – I’ll try my best to advise you on fixing it but in no way I should be held responsible – responsibility is all yours. So again – if you are interested – drop a comment on this post and I’ll email you.

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There is this undocumented feature of recover mode in Kindle 2. I’m posting about it but please don’t mess with it unless you know what are you doing because it can potentially brick your Kindle. K1 had an option of 100% wiping and reflashing the device to the origianl state. This option doesn’t seem to be present in K2 tough.

To enter Recovery Mode you need to hold the “Home” key while the device is rebooting when the screen flashes from black to white for a couple of seconds. If you see “Amazon Kindle” and boot progress bar – it’s too late and you need to reboot again.

When in recovery mode, you can hook up your Kindle to computer via USB and mess with the files just like in the normal mode. You can also press “1″ and this will initiate installation of update from the root directory of Kindle drive. However normal updates (2.0.1 and 2.0.2 as well as screensaver hack) don’t install this way – Kindle just ignores them. With a little tweaking I was able to get Kindle to see the update but it would still fail to install.

Pressing “R” key will reboot your Kindle 2 back into normal mode.

What is interesting is that when I called the number on the screen the tech didn’t know what “Recovery Mode” I was talking about.

This is not a whole lot of useful information yet even that I had to piece together from different places on the Internet when trying to repair my Kindle 2 myself. I eventually gave up and called the warranty.

If I figure out the “recovery mode update” trick I’ll surely post about it.

Engadget reports that undisclosed law firm on behalf of Amazon.com sent cease and desist letter to MobileRead.com admins demanding pages that host instructions on how to use Python script that allows you to read legally purchased DRM protected eBooks in MobiPocket format on Kindle and Kindle 2.

My personal opinion is that it’s not as simple as Engadget and TechDirt would like to portray it. For one, Engadget’s statement that the script “script, which can’t actually be used to break Kindle DRM” is misleading. I will not elaborate why. If you research the matter yourself, you may find out what I mean. I don’t want to take sides on this particular issue, I just want to point out that there’s more to it than meets the eye or what’s written in mainstream news.

While I am personally a big supporter of open information market where content creators and distributors are fairly compensated for their work and law-abiding users are not limited by crippling DRM systems that bind them to specific hardware. But before this can happen market should get big enough. Otherwise it may collapse because of extreme competition. Amazon is currently the biggest driver or eBook market growth. Cut their profits, their eBook business may collapse and there will be no market at all. Recent release of Kindle application for iPhone and iPodTouch is a step in the right direction towards more open information market. Because it allows usage of purchased digital content to be freely used across two different software and hardware platforms. Hopefully soon more steps like this will follow.

There is a way to get custom images to display in Kindle 1 screensaver instead of standard ones that are supplied by Amazon. I found these instructions on MobileRead Wiki page:

To add your custom screen savers:

1. Attach the Kindle to a computer using the USB cord.
2. Using Windows Explorer (or whatever you use to see individual files/folders) , you should see a new drive called Kindle under My Computer. Go to that drive. (Or if you have an SD card in your Kindle, you can go to the SD drive.)
3. Create a new folder called “pictures” and a subfolder called “screensavers” under it. Make sure both folder names are all lowercase.
4. Copy your image files into the screensavers folder. Your pictures should be 600×800 pixels and black & white. I’ve only used .jpg files. Note: I’ve used .png files as well
5. After copying is complete & it is safe, remove the Kindle from the USB connection.
6. Go to your Home menu and press alt-z. This will create a new book called “screensavers” . Open it. You’ll see each of your pictures. You can advance through them with the prev. page and next page buttons. Note: The new book will appear at the END of your book list
7. While viewing your pictures, look at the bottom of the Kindle screen. If you see your battery indicator & Menu prompt, press alt-F to go into Full Screen mode.
8. On each photo, press alt-shift-0 (i.e., alt-shift-zero) . After a brief delay, you’ll get a message that your picture has been exported as screensaver. Click Close on the message.
9. Navigate to each of the pictures you want to use and repeat the above step.
10. When you’ve got all your pictures loaded, test them by going into & out of sleep mode. Alt-aA (i.e., alt-font size button) puts it to sleep & wakes it up again. Each time it sleeps, it should use a different image. If you see the same image all the time, relook at Step 3.

To remove your custom screen savers and restore the originals

1. Attach the Kindle to a computer using the USB cord.
2. Using Windows Explorer (or whatever you use to see individual files/folders) , go to your Kindle drive under My Computer.
3. If you see a folder called system, skip this step. If you don’t see the system folder, click on the Tools menu & then Folder Options. Go to the View tab, and look at the Advanced Settings. Under Hidden Files and Folders, select Show Hidden Files and Folders. Click Apply, then OK. You should now see a system folder.
4. Under the system folder, you’ll see a screen_saver folder. Delete all the files that are in that folder.
5. After you disconnect from the USB, you may see your last custom screensaver one more time, but after that it will revert back to the pre-loaded Kindle screensaver images

I’ve tried these instructions on Kindle 2 with no effect other than freezing the picture viewer and having to soft reboot the device. Please read my other post on how to hack screensaver in Kindle 2.

Please realize that these hacks can potentially void your warranty.

For people who wanted to replace author pictures in Kindle 2 Screensaver with any pictures of their own there is now a solution. clarknova from MobileRead Forums created a custom update that allows you to replace Amazon-supplied pictures that are shown when Kindle 2 goes to sleep with any pictures of your own.

Before you continue with instructions below, please understand that you are doing it at your own risk and this can potentially void your warranty. On the bright side, the update seems small, straightforward and reversable and several people (myself included – see pictures below) have successfully applied it to their devices.

Important thing to remember is that this update changes some configuration files. Official Amazon updates verify file checksums before installing. So while you have this hack installed updates that would try to change the same file will fail. Solution is to reverse this hack (instructions below), apply Amazon update and then reapply the hack.

Before proceeding you may want to take a look at “Updating Kindle Software Post” and make sure that you have the most recent software on your Kindle.

To enable custom screensavers:

1. Download kindle_screensaver_hack-0.3.zip. This seems to the latest version now and I’ll try to keep this post updated with more versions as they become available.
2. Unpack it.
3. Connect your Kindle to your PC via USB. Go to the Kindle drive (usually K:\)
4. If you don’t see system folder, you need to configure Windows to show hidden files and folders. Otherwise go the next step.
5. Go to the \system folder and create screen_saver subfolder in it.
6. Copy all of the images you want your screensaver to randomly cycle tough. Both PNG and JPEG formats are OK. While Kindle will resize images it’s best to resize them to 600×800 beforehand. Definitely don’t try putting 10 megapixel photos from your camera there as screensaver would then take long time to load and image will not display right. Good freeware tool to edit images is Paint.NET
7. Copy Update_kindle2_user_screen_savers.bin that you’ve unpacked in step 2 to the root directory of your Kindle 2.
8. Unplug the USB cable.
9. Press “Menu”, select “Settings”, press “Menu”, select “Update Your Kindle”.
10. It normally should take under a minute to update and reboot your Kindle. And you’re done!

If you did everything right you should see the following in at the bottom of your settings screen.

…

…

To revert to standard screensavers:

1. Connect your Kindle to your PC via USB. Go to the Kindle drive (usually K:\)
2. Copy Update_kindle2_restore_default_screen_savers.bin to the root directory of your Kindle 2.
3. Unplug the USB cable.
4. Press “Menu”, select “Settings”, press “Menu”, select “Update Your Kindle”.
5. It normally should take under a minute to update and reboot your Kindle. And you’re done!
6. If you want to disable custom screensavers for good rather than temporarily disable the hack to install Amazon Update, you may want to delete the \system\screen_saver directory you’ve created before. Be extra careful not to delete anything else in the \system directory!

Wikimedia.org may be a good place to stock up on nice copyright-free images.

If you try this hack, please take a minute to post your experience in the comments as I”m sure most people who read this post will be interested in them.