91–100 of 101 posts
I love my Kindle. One of the best tech buys in recent memory. The thing I want to be able to do is share books with my wife as if they were 'real books'. In other words, one of us at a time gets a lock on it, but there's no time limit.
I've had complete strangers, totally normal people (picture the exact opposite of a stereotypical techie), raving to me in a shop about how great their Kindle is because they saw me play with the demo device. That's a home run in anyone's language.
But Aaron, who seems to have trained himself to appreciate the finer details, has this joyous experience ruined for him in much the same way a wine snob can no longer enjoy an even passable glass of wine.
I guess the missing factor is how much effort is expended on these nicities versus the return on that investment.
If the text below a main icon is cut off, is that a sign of how shoddily the entire thing is put together, or is it simply not important, compared with the many benefits the device gives you?
To me the Kindle has two killer features: the screen (because I can read it like paper for hours) and its weight (can hold it for hours like a paperback book). Those two things made it a 'wow' device. The 3G access made it effortless. None of those things seem very clever and have been pretty easily duplicated in the Nook. The software itself (and this applies to Kindle and Nook) is rather ugly and it feels slow to r…
I can't speak for the ugliness, but as for the slow to react... I think the reason it feels sluggish are two reasons: The screen technology has a slow response time. This is alittle difficult to fix, due to the nature of the technology: an electic field turns on or off causing tiny balls to be pulled to the top or bottom of the screen causing light to be reflected/absorbed. Due to the size of these balls (microns), i…
Patents exist for better eInk displays: http://www.faqs.org/patents/app/20080238894 I look forward to a fast-updating book reader. One day I may even be able to flip through an eBook! Until then they have a long way to go, to reproduce the book-in-hand feel.
I'm beginning to develop a theory that this kind of Apple-fandom is somewhere between being an audiophile and a mentally contagious form of OCD. I've had complete strangers, totally normal people (picture the exact opposite of a stereotypical techie), raving to me in a shop about how great their Kindle is because they saw me play with the demo device. That's a home run in anyone's language. But Aaron, who seems to ha…
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Please leave my Kindle alone. I don't want it to be fancy. I want to read books on it. Cheap, long battery life, and a screen that reads like a book is as clever as I ever want from it. I have no intention of replacing my kindle anytime soon. I don't care if a new version comes out that's 10 times faster... I'm completely content with the one I have. When I want to use an iPad (for something other than reading books)…
The first question I always get from people who haven't seen a Kindle before is "can you go on the internet with it?" sigh "No- it's just for reading books. Nothing else." The problem is, I realise that it can go on the internet. It's just so damn slow that it makes everything else look way better. Not offering web browsing would stop feature creep.
You can download books straight from the internet to your device. You can go to the Project Gutenberg website (http://www.gutenberg.org/) browse for a public domain book, and download it straight to your device. You don't need to use an intermediate computer.
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On the other hand, when you get a Kindle in the mail you don't have to connect it to a computer with iTunes on it to get it to work. I can also load books from my computer onto the Kindle using drag-and-drop without needing iTunes (or any Amazon software) installed.
In an even nicer twist, when I upgraded to the latest model from my original Kindle, the new one showed up with all of my books already synced so I could literally just open the package, turn it on, and pick up right where I'd left off with the old one. This is pretty small and probably caused more by coincidence based on how the system works than actual intent but it impressed me a lot. I've been a big Kindle user s…
Isn't it true that media is per-device on the Apple platform? That you have to pay again for each reader you own? Even an upgrade can require paying again.
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Does eBooks have iCloud support for non-Apple books yet? Amazon now allows me to upload all of my non-Amazon books by email, and I can re-download them onto any Kindle device like books I purchased from Amazon.
They don't... yet. iCloud just launched last month. I expect support will be added as the service grows.
"And this is all before I’ve even got to the disastrous incompatibilities between the Kindle device, the Kindle for Mac app, the Kindle for iOS app, the Kindle Online Reader (read.amazon.com), and the kindle.amazon.com social network — all of which are full of gruesome interface annoyances of their own." I just bought a Kindle, and besides my first attempt at buying one resulted in returning it to Best Buy because of…
"At $40 for an interior design class"? What is the connection between interior design and the kindle? And/or what is the connection between the monetization plan of a night class at a CC and the kindle?
So far I've had a pretty frustrating experience with the Kindle (Kindle 4 no keyboard, no touchscreen) from the get-go. Sure, the box was nice, but as soon as I powered it on it was frustrating. Since the Kindle was a gift, I had to enter in my Amazon account information before I could do anything else. Total buzzkill. I wanted to flip through a book and see what the screen was like and how it worked, but instead I h…
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Connecting with iTunes is actually no longer required for iOS devices starting with iOS 5. You can also add PDFs to iBooks on the device without iTunes -- not sure about epub files though.
But iTunes is required to update my ipod to iOS 5 :-) I've never been able to get large pdf's onto my ipod without itunes. Can't email them because they're too big, and the ipod cannot browse local shared directories.