Third Shelf

I finally took the plunge and purchased the Kindle 6″ Global Wireless edition from Amazon. I simply couldn’t wait for it to arrive. Something akin to a 7 year old getting his first bicycle. Finally, the day arrived!

Packaging

The packaging was so impressive it is almost worth its own blog post – the attention to detail was outstanding. For example, how much attention do you pay to bar codes? Well, Amazon didn’t slip on bar code detail. Have a closer look and you’ll see that little man sitting under the tree reading his book…

The next interesting part is the “Certified frustration-free packaging” seal. That seal lives up to the promise. Opening the box is done with a peel-off strip. What a neat way to open the box. Again, Amazon had the detail going – the opening strip read “Once upon a time…”. Mission accomplished: frustration-free packaging.

Cover

I decided to get the well-worth-it leather cover for the additional $31.99. At the bottom right there is a metal branding insert. Nice idea, although, I was a little disappointed with the top right hand corner as the leather wasn’t properly fitted around the plate. The stitching around the edges is very neat and the feel of the cover is luxurious.

Inside, it has a soft padded inner; front and back; that is essential to protect the screen from accidental bumps. Before I bought the cover, I was perplexed about how the device attaches to the cover. Maybe with elastic bands around each corner, I thought?! The website wasn’t too detailed about it and for the price of $31.99 I would expect it to be a decent cover with a proper attachment mechanism. And so it was. The attaching mechanism of the cover just simply blew me away. With only two ingenious hinges the cover and the device will have a hard time separating by itself. The bottom hinge slides into the device at an angle and the top hinge slides into the device. It has a spring action and releases when pulled downwards. So, the device attaches by sliding in the bottom hinge at an angle and secured by the top hinge. Ingenious.

Power adapter

Battery powered devices have this tendency to run down from time to time and needs to be charged every so often. Luckily the Kindle ships with more than one way to get this much needed charge. Firstly, there is charging by USB and secondly, charging by plugging into the mains. The latter is done with an American style two pin plug. Having ordered the global edition, it is a little unusual to find an American style plug in the packaging. With this in mind Amazon realized that this is not quite optimal and included another adapter that converts the American style to an European two pin style plug. Great, I live in South Africa where we have huge three pin plugs. Nothing that another adapter can’t fix. A downside is that the battery is not easily replaced, except by sending it in to Amazon. I suspect that this is by design. Annuity income?

The device

When taking the device out of the packaging, I was surprised that instructions were printed on the screen. How amazing to realize that E-Ink doesn’t consume any power to display static  text or images. As can be seen in the photo, a random image is rendered on the display every time it is switched off.

I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of the display. It renders fonts with a very nice smooth precise anti alias effect. The display can be read from almost any angle. The downside is that it doesn’t have a back light and I hope that it will make an appearance in future editions. Although I can easily justify it by saying “you can’t read a book in the dark, can you?”. Another little annoying thing with the display is the “clearing” effect when paging. With e-ink, the reader first has to black the current page, clear the page and then render the text or image. However, this process is fairly quick on the Kindle and one gets used to the effect quickly.

In South Africa I was also surprised to find the 3G connection worked first time round without any hassles and automatically registered the Kindle at Amazon when the first connection was established.It seems to be making use of the Vodacom network. Using the 3G connection is weighs down on the battery and I would recommend using it only when necessary.

The buttons are perfectly placed on the device – when you are not using the cover. Using the left-hand buttons with the cover on is not user friendly. It is rather silly that the previous page-button is only on the left. Not a problem if you use the device without the cover. The five-way scroll button is perhaps a little on the small side but quite functional. Don’t expect to use the keyboard like an ordinary one. The buttons are tiny. Why is there a keyboard on Kindle?

When reading a book on the Kindle, you’ll be surprised to know that it comes with a dictionary that is automatically invoked when you scroll to a word and hover. Brilliant. You can do manual searches in the dictionary, make annotations on pages. Setting a bookmark on a page makes a little dog-ear shape appear in the top right-hand corner.

Another surprise was the back of the device. It has a very neat brushed metal finish and makes it feel expensive. The serial number is printed at the bottom, in case you are wondering. Beside that the Kindle has built-in text-to-speech functionality which works brilliantly.

Loading your own PDF documents to the Kindle is a cinch. It mounts the same as a flash drive in Windows and books and PDF documents are copied to the documents folder. One thing that I found is that when plugging it into the USB port the device becomes “unusable” until you eject it from Windows. I have tried to eject it to get it usable while plugged in but with no success. Maybe it’s just me?

Being able to load PDF documents (from version 2.3) is great. Not being able to zoom them is not so great. I hope to see a zoom feature added to the PDF documents reader. The display can be rotated but the reader just doesn’t feel right being read in a rotated manner.

Shopping on the Kindle is great experience with custom layouts specially formatted for the Kindle. Beware that the quickest way to being broke is to enable the Buy now with 1-Click facility. It’s ease of use is addictive.

When reading a book the Kindle disappears once you get into the book. It’s a great reading device and at the price of $259 I strongly recommend it.