Kindle DX : News Customer Reviews

The Kindle DX is an absolute major step forward to book reading. It stores more books than I could ever hope to read but I, therefore, know that I do not have to worry about running out of space. The screen can be read in direct sunlight as well as if you were indoors. Some complain that this is not true; however, I’m here to tell you the screen can be read easily anywhere.

The automatic switching from landscape to portrait is a great feature as is the easy switching of font size. These both happen quickly and easily. I have noticed that I can read much faster than if I were reading a physical book. I can’t explain that but it’s true!
Battery capacity is WAY more than adequate. I’ve had it a couple of months now and I’ve only seen the battery indicator come off of full charge once. The wireless connection drags down the charge MUCH faster so, unless you are downloading something, keep it turned off. That also is very easy to do.

I have quite a few pdf manuals for products that I own on my computer and it was very, very easy to transfer them to the Kindle. I only wish there were a way to zoom in on some of the diagrams!

Now for the bad news, what there is of it. The wireless connection is through Sprint so if you are like me, you have no service and you must travel somewhere with service to download books you bought. You can still surf the Kindle site on your computer, choose what you want, and then wait until you are within the service area of Sprint to download. Why they can’t give you a choice of carriers is a problem but not a ‘no deal’ for me. Just an annoyance.

You WILL have to purchase a cover of some sort to protect the Kindle’s screen and it should be substantial. Unfortunately, the ones that offer the most protection are $50 for the leather ones. That’s what I have and it is an excellently made product but expensive.

Speaking of expensive, while there are some free books you can download, most are $10 each and a surprising number are even more. Usually, the Kindle version is perhaps $0.50 less than a paperback version purchased from Amazon. Since you cannot pass the Kindle book on to someone else to read, I would think that the price should be substantially less. $10 may be cheap for a ‘Best Seller’, but not for books that are years old!

Yes, the Kindle DX is expensive but, being a sucker for new technology, I bit the bullet. I would have expected a much longer warranty for a product that costs that much! I can only feel that they have less confidence in their product than I do……

Overall, I’m glad I have the Kindle DX. I use it daily and have read several books already. I do get embarrassed when asked how much I paid for it. I’m retired and my money is limited so this was a MAJOR purchase in my budget. It BETTER last!

Kindle DX - a different kind of Kindle

This is a copy of the review of Kindle DX that I’ve posted at my blog (http://blogkindle.com) Blog Kindle

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 Kindle 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

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 Kindle 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

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 Kindle 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

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.
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

Amazon Kindle DX: 9.7-inch screen and $489

 Amazon’s third incarnation of the Kindle is here, folks. All 9.7-inches of it. Specs and info leaked about the now official Kindle over the last week and they seemed pretty much dead on. It comes packing with the larger screen, auto-rotating screen, and finally supports PDF files fully with a native PDF reader. This larger Kindle also ups the storage capacity from 1,500 books on the Kindle 2 to 3,500 on the Kindle DX thanks to 3.3GB of on board memory. The order is up now and will ship shortly if you’re willing to drop $489 on one.

More pics and info after the jump.

Slim: Just over 1/3 of an inch, as thin as most magazines

Lightweight: At 10.2 ounces, lighter than a typical paperback

Wireless: 3G wireless lets you download books right from your Kindle, anytime, anywhere; no monthly fees, service plans, or hunting for Wi-Fi hotspots

Books in Under 60 Seconds: Get books delivered in less than 60 seconds; no PC required

Improved Display: Reads like real paper; now boasts 16 shades of gray for clear text and even crisper images

Longer Battery Life: 25% longer battery life; read for days without recharging

More Storage: Take your library with you; holds over 1,500 books

Faster Page Turns: 20% faster page turns

Read-to-Me: With the new text-to-speech feature, Kindle can read every newspaper, magazine, blog, and book out loud to you, unless the book is disabled by the rights holder

Large Selection: Over 275,000 books plus U.S. and international newspapers, magazines, and blogs available

Low Book Prices: New York Times Best Sellers and New Releases $9.99, unless marked otherwise

Introducing Kindle DX–Amazon’s Large Screen Addition to the Kindle Family of Wireless Reading Devices
Large Kindle DX Display and New Features Provide Enhanced Experience for Reading a Wide Range of Professional and Personal Documents
SEATTLE–(BUSINESS WIRE)–May. 6, 2009– Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) today introduced Amazon Kindle DX, the new purpose-built reading device that offers Kindle’s revolutionary wireless delivery and massive selection of content with a large 9.7-inch electronic paper display, built-in PDF reader, auto-rotate capability, and storage for up to 3,500 books. More than 275,000 books are now available in the Kindle Store, including 107 of 112 current New York Times Best Sellers. New York Times Bestsellers and New Releases are $9.99 unless marked otherwise. Top U.S. and international magazines and newspapers plus more than 1,500 blogs are also available. Kindle DX is available for pre-order starting today for $489 at http://amazon.com/kindleDX and will ship this summer.

“Personal and professional documents look so good on the big Kindle DX display that you’ll find yourself changing ink-toner cartridges less often,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com Founder and CEO. “Cookbooks, computer books, and textbooks – anything highly formatted – also shine on the Kindle DX. Carry all your documents and your whole library in one slender package.”

New Large Display

Kindle DX’s display has 2.5 times the surface area of Kindle’s 6-inch display. The larger electronic paper display with 16 shades of gray has more area for graphic-rich content such as professional and personal documents, newspapers and magazines, and textbooks. Kindle reads like printed words on paper because the screen works using real ink and doesn’t use a backlight, eliminating the eyestrain and glare associated with other electronic displays.

The New York Times Company and Washington Post Company are launching pilots with Kindle DX this summer. The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and The Washington Post will offer the Kindle DX at a reduced price to readers who live in areas where home-delivery is not available and who sign up for a long-term subscription to the Kindle edition of the newspapers.

“At The New York Times Company we are always seeking new ways for our millions of readers to have full and continuing access to our high-quality news and information,” said Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., chairman, The New York Times Company and publisher, The New York Times. “The wireless delivery and new value-added features of the Kindle DX will provide our large, loyal audience, no matter where they live, with an exciting new way to interact with The New York Times and The Boston Globe. Additionally, by offering a subscription through the Kindle DX to readers who live outside of our delivery areas, we will extend our reach to our loyal readers who will be able to more readily enjoy their favorite newspapers. Meanwhile, we are continuing to work with Amazon to make The New York Times and The Boston Globe experiences on Kindle better than ever.”

Kindle DX’s large display offers an enhanced reading experience with another category of graphic-rich content—textbooks. With complex images, tables, charts, graphs, and equations, textbooks look best on a large display. Leading textbook publishers Cengage Learning, Pearson, and Wiley, together representing more than 60 percent of the U.S. higher education textbook market, will begin offering textbooks through the Kindle Store beginning this summer. Textbooks under the following brands will be available: Addison-Wesley, Allyn & Bacon, Benjamin Cummings, Longman & Prentice Hall (Pearson); Wadsworth, Brooks/Cole, Course Technology, Delmar, Heinle, Schirmer, South-Western (Cengage); and Wiley Higher Education.

Arizona State University, Case Western Reserve University, Princeton University, Reed College, and Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia will launch trial programs to make Kindle DX devices available to students this fall. The schools will distribute hundreds of Kindle DX devices to students spread across a broad range of academic disciplines. In addition to reading on a considerably larger screen, students will be able to take advantage of popular Kindle features such as the ability to take notes and highlight, search across their library, look up words in a built-in dictionary, and carry all of their books in a lightweight device.

“The Kindle DX holds enormous potential to influence the way students learn,” said Barbara R. Snyder, president of Case Western Reserve University. “We look forward to seeing how the device affects the participation of both students and faculty in the educational experience.”

New Built-In PDF Reader

Kindle DX features a built-in PDF reader using Adobe Reader Mobile technology for reading professional and personal documents. Like other types of documents on Kindle, customers simply email their PDF format documents to their Kindle email address or move them over using a USB connection. With a larger display and built-in PDF reader, Kindle DX customers can read professional and personal documents with more complex layouts without scrolling, panning, or zooming, and without re-flowing, which destroys the original structure of the document. Everything from annual reports with graphs to flight manuals with maps to musical scores can be viewed on a single, crisp screen with Kindle DX.

New Auto-Rotation

Kindle DX’s display content auto-rotates so users can read in portrait or landscape mode, or flip the device to read with either hand. Simply turn Kindle DX and immediately see full-width landscape views of maps, graphs, tables, images, and Web pages.

New 3.3 GB Memory Holds Up To 3,500 Books

With 3.3 GB of available memory, Kindle DX can hold up to 3,500 books, compared with 1,500 with Kindle. And because Amazon automatically backs up a copy of every Kindle book purchased, customers can wirelessly re-download titles from their library at any time.

Incredibly Thin

Kindle DX is just over a third of an inch thin, which is thinner than most magazines.

3G Wireless, No PC, No Hunting for Wi-Fi Hot Spots

Just like Kindle, Kindle DX customers automatically take advantage of Amazon Whispernet to wirelessly shop the Kindle Store, download or receive new content in less than 60 seconds, and read from their library—all without a PC, Wi-Fi hot spot, or syncing. Amazon still pays for the wireless connectivity on Kindle DX so books can be downloaded in less than 60 seconds—with no monthly fees, data plans, or service contracts.

Syncs With Kindle for iPhone and other Kindle Compatible Devices

Just like Kindle, Kindle DX uses Amazon Whispersync technology to automatically sync content across Kindle, Kindle DX, Kindle for iPhone, and other devices in the future. With Whispersync, customers can easily move from device to device and never lose their place in their reading.

Massive Selection of Books—Plus Newspapers, Magazines, and Blogs

The Kindle Store currently offers more than 275,000 books, including popular books like New York Times Bestsellers, New Releases, and fiction and nonfiction released in the past several years. Dozens of newspapers and magazines are also available for subscription or single-edition purchase. BusinessWeek and The New England Journal of Medicine are available in the Kindle Store starting today, and The Economist will be available soon. Subscriptions are auto-delivered wirelessly to Kindle overnight so that the latest edition is waiting for customers when they wake up. Over 1,500 blogs are available on Kindle and updated and downloaded wirelessly throughout the day.

Kindle DX includes all the other features Kindle customers enjoy every day, including:

Wirelessly send, receive, and read personal documents in a variety of formats such as Microsoft Word and PDF
Look up words instantly using the built-in 250,000 word New Oxford American Dictionary
Choose from six text sizes
Add bookmarks, notes, and highlights
Text-to-speech technology that converts words on a page to spoken word
Search Web, Wikipedia.org, Kindle Store, and your library of purchased content
No setup required—Kindle comes ready to use—no software to load or set up
Amazon Kindle is sold through Amazon Digital Services, Inc.

By Matt Burns

Kindle DX: Amazon’s 9.7″ Wireless Reading Device (Latest Generation)

I have owned both Kindle 1 and Kindle 2, so I’m already committed to the basic idea: e-ink reading in a slim form factor with excellent connectivity to a large selection of books and subscriptions. I have come to rely on my Kindle experience, and it has seriously enhanced my reading.

The Kindle DX was not an obvious upgrade for me, but two features put me over the edge: the larger screen, and the native PDF reader. I now have the DX in my hands, and can report PROS, CONS, and NEUTRALS:

PROS:

– the larger screen is a definite plus. I use the larger type size on my Kindle 2 (older eyes), and at this type size I get far more text per page on the Kindle DX. This makes the whole reading experience more book-like (and should be a boon to people who buy large-print books.)

– the screen is also sharper and crisper than my Kindle 2 in a side-by-side comparison: the text is darker, and the contrast is much better, making for better visibility overall.

– on a side note, the larger screen also makes it possible to read poetry on the kindle, even at large type sizes. On earlier Kindles, the smaller screen cut off lines, so that you would lose the sense of when the poet ended the line. On the Kindle DX, you can see the whole line exactly as the poet meant it, with the cut-off in the right spot.

– the PDF reader works as advertised, and is extremely convenient. PDF documents appear on the DX exactly as they do on a computer screen. Moreover, you can drag and drop your documents directly to the device using the USB cable (or use the for-a-fee email if you absolutely must.) The only downside: at least for the documents that I’ve used so far, I cannot adjust the type size as I can with native Kindle documents.

– screen rotation also works as advertised: it operates as a mild zoom on both graphics and text and offsets slightly the downside of not being able to adjust the typesize on PDF documents. One nice design touch: the four-way navigation stick introduced on the Kindle 2 is rotation-sensitive, and will move as expected relative to the screen rotation.

– more of the device space is devoted to the screen, while the white plastic border around the screen seems to have shrunk, both in general and compared to the proportion of screen to plastic on the Kindle 2. I like this (but see below about the keyboard).

– storage: I like the increase in storage space, and don’t mind the lack of an external storage card. I can see some people having trouble with this, but only those folks who either a) must regularly carry around PDF documents totalling more than 3.5 GB of space or b) must have nearly 3500 books regularly at their fingertips. I fall in neither category.

CONS:

– price: it’s expensive, as you can tell pretty quickly. If you value the larger size, and the native PDF reader, these features may justify the roughly 30% premium you pay for the DX over the Kindle 2. In truth, the Kindle DX SHOULD cost more than the Kindle 2, and a 30% premium isn’t unreasonable. But, for my money, Amazon should drop the price on the Kindle 2 to $300 or so, and charge $400 or a little less for the DX. Still, I bought it, and will keep it at this price.

– one-sided navigation buttons: all of the buttons are now on the right side, and none are on the left. I’m a righty, so I shouldn’t complain, but I found myself using both sides on the Kindle 2. Lefties have reason to complain, I think.

– One-handed handling: I often read while I walk, with my Kindle in one hand, and something else in my other. Because of the button layout, this will be more difficult on the Kindle DX.

– metal backing: I miss the tacky rubberized backing on my Kindle 1. When I placed my Kindle 1 on an inclined surface, it stayed in place. Not so my Kindle 2 and now my DX. This is not a complaint specific to the Kindle DX, but it’s still there.

NEUTRALS (i.e. things worth noting):

– weight: the DX is heavier, noticeably so. This is only an issue if, like me, you regularly use the kindle with one hand . . . and even so, it’s still doable.

– keyboard: the keyboard has 4 rows, and not 5: the top row of numbers from the Kindle 1 and 2 has been merged into the top qwerty row, so that numbers are now only accessible with an alt-key combination. The keys are vertically thinner too, so that the whole keyboard is no more than 1″ tall (compared to over an 1.5″ on the Kindle 2). At the same time, the keys themselves are a bit easier to press, a bit more protruding than on the Kindle 2. For someone with big fingers (like me), this will be a slightly harder keyboard to use, but only slightly.

That’s all I can see. Overall, the pluses outweigh the minuses for me, and I’m satisfied with my purchase. I can now think of using my Kindle DX for work documents on a regular basis, because of the PDF reader. The screen size and screen rotation make the overall reading experience more immersive.

Overall, the Kindle DX feels more like text and less like device and comes closer to the stated goal of the Kindle: for the device to disappear, leaving only the joy of reading.