Amazon took a major step in making the Kindle more compelling than the Nook (more on whether it’s still a tie later) by adding some really cool features -
- In-built PDF Support. You get this on Kindle 2 Global and Kindle 2.
- 75% longer battery life – Use the Kindle for up to a week with wireless on.
- Screen Rotation – You can manually rotate the screen. Note that Kindle 2 does NOT have an accelerometer so you must select the screen rotation from the Fonts menu.
These are big, big changes - In particular the in-built support for PDF documents.
The Kindle DX gets only two changes -
- Automatic cropping of whitespace in PDF files. It’s an important change as it’ll greatly increase readability of lots of PDF files.
- Longer Screensaver TimeOut Wait – You now have 20 minutes (instead of just 5 minutes) before the Kindle DX’s screensaver gets activated.
You can read up on all the changes at Amazon. Here’s a snippet -
Built-in PDF reader: Your Kindle can now display PDF documents without losing the formatting of the original file. Send PDF documents directly to your Kindle (via your @Kindle address) or drag and drop PDF files from your computer to your Kindle (when connected via USB).
Longer battery life for Kindle (Global Wireless): You can now read for up to 1 week on a single charge with wireless on. Turn wireless off and read for up to 2 weeks.
Manual screen rotation: The Kindle screen can now manually rotate between portrait and landscape views so you can see the entire width of a web page or magnify the page of a PDF file. The page-turn buttons work the same in either orientation, and the 5-way controller movements are switched to match the orientation.
The Kindle keeps getting better 
.
What are people saying about Kindle PDF Support and enhancements?
- ZDNet and Welt broke the news. They don’t really dig into the updates - However, kudos for catching it.
- Paid Content are saying that only Kindle Global gets extended battery life.
- TeleRead shines once again as a user comment points out update details for the Kindle DX -
PDF Change: Margins are cropped only in Landscape Mode. Subscription items no longer have ‘progress dots’.
At MobileRead people are now finding new things to complain about.
- While they’re happy about being able to read PDFs and landscape mode and screen rotation and searching documents for words.
- They are upset about no highlights or notes in PDFs, no built-in dictionary.
- Also, some PDFs (obviously, it’s a 6″ screen) can’t be read properly as their text is too small – There’s no Zoom for PDFs.
However, it’s a HUGE upgrade to have in-built PDF support. The 75% increase in battery life is very impressive too and a commenter at MobileRead suggests its a standby mode that shuts off whispernet wireless when not in use – makes sense.
The Kindle is now a much better value proposition.
Filed under: evolution | Tagged: kindle pdf, kindle upgrade
Just a caution for your readers. If you’ve been using any Kindle hacks, they no longer work. A programmer on the Mobilread forum suggests that the Kindle update now only allowed ‘signed or authorized’ updates to the device. That eliminates hacks which work by simulating updates.
on the DX, PDF of powerpoint presentations used to show as a continuous strip of paper. For example the 1st screen was 80% of the 1st slide, page advacne and you got 20% of the 1st slide and 60% of the 2nd slide as the content filled the width of the screen. With the update you now get 80% of the 1st slide on the 1st screen, page advance you get the remaining 20%, page advance you get the top 80% of the 2nd slide. Still annoying to not see the entire slide but not as bad as before.
really interesting. thanks for the update.
And those of us on Kindle get…nothing?
(The above should read “on Kindle 1″.)
that is unfortunate. Perhaps there are some limitations – perhaps they add something later. Let’s hope for the latter.
Excellent move for the Kindle!
Just curious, what’s the Kindle 2 internal memory capacity?
2 GB memory – However, only 1.4 GB is available for books, documents, audiobooks, mp3 files, etc.
while it would be really really nice to be able to underline/annotate pdf’s, 1. the dx, which has always possessed ‘read’ capability has never offered underlining and annotation; and 2. um. the actual acrobat reader doesn’t even permit it. it used to — *with* permission conferred by a document’s author. but since when should i need the author’s permission to underline anything. so, it’s an annoyance, but i’m not sure i think it’s reasonable to be annoyed with amazon specifically. actually, i’m happy, and feeling pretty heart-warmed at this point, since i requested the pdf-read/screen rotation capability for same explicitly in an e-mail that i sent back when the dx was launched.
it’s still feeling to me as if all things adobe are still pretty singlemindedly ‘all things print’. hopeful about epub, but we’ll see. i look forward to hearing from sony touch owners. once the things become truly available. that seems like a very cool device.
I own a sony touch. The touch layer messes with readability. It’s a very good device otherwise – Sony really should add wireless capabilities to it.
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