Much well-deserved drooling over the Kindle DX. The killer app is native PDF support: as Michael Trick pointed out, the earlier Kindles didn't do too well with math support (the native Kindle document format is not PDF). I could easily see myself using the DX at conferences, rather than lugging around my laptop, or (worse) printing out copies of papers I wanted.
The Kindle has a nice feature that you can email documents to a specific address and have them synced automatically to the device, but it comes at a price ($0.10/document). If you use a direct transfer over USB though, it's free of course.
What I don't understand is why this has taken so long to happen: it seems to me that the academic market is the killer market for the Kindle: can you imagine transferring ALL your PDF papers to the Kindle for reading ? not to mention books ?
p.s for those of you who will no doubt point out that other readers exist that can read PDF, and are puzzled by all the hype over the Kindle, I leave you to your Archos MP3 players and Opera browsers.
p.p.s I spotted my first Kindle in the wild a month ago at a conference. It was rather cute looking. the DX will be much larger of course.
You mean Sansa and Firefox, but sure, the idea that one should let one company control a market by offering a second rate product is clearly the right way to go.
ReplyDelete"Archos MP3"...I think I had one of those!
ReplyDeleteMeh. I can't really read scientific papers without writing notes on them.
ReplyDeleteI'll stick to reading papers on my X61 tablet until an e-reader/writer with a nice form factor comes out. (The iRexes don't count.)
The Kindle DX is already the 4th most popular electronic on Amazon.com and it isn't even available yet! http://bit.ly/JEHNj
ReplyDeleteI've looked at alternative ebook readers, and the only one large enough to provide full page pdf support at the moment is the iRex DR1000S. And on the down side, it's much pricier than the kindle.
ReplyDeleteOn the plus side though, it allows you to annotate your papers using a stylus (using Wacom's technology, the undisputed and heavily patented king of drawing tablets).
On the other down side, I hear that the eInk display reacts much more slowly than normal displays, so if annotating is your deal a tablet PC might be better. But then you lose the eye-kindness of eInk etc...
I find the new DX a great leap from the first Kindle. The bigger screen allows for smoother reading, the graphics are awesome, and I like the weight and feel of it. The five way search button is great. I also like the set up of the dictionary it is more user friendly.
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