Local Tech Repair: Kindle 3

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Kindle 3

The Kindle 3 is a nice E-reader with an amazing price. I just got my first e-reader yesterday night and have been on it all day (already around 20 hours). so here are my thoughts on it.

Managing books:

If your someone like me that has a lot of ebooks managing them on your kindle is not easy and not user friendly. They organize books by catalogs for everything.. The kindle is slow in when trying to add a book to a catalog around 6 or so clicks to add a book and back.

The easiest thing to add books to your kindle that you did not buy from amazon would be to use calibrie.
Calibrie is an amazing piece of software. you are able to convert different formats like a PDF to MOBI so that your kindle can take advantage of altering the text.

Book viewing:

Once you get to a book that your viewing the kindle does have some nice things about it. the you can change the size of the text easily and have the kindle read to you (which sometimes is funny sounding).
the Screen helps make reading very easy. the clarity of the screen is a big advantage and i was surprised when i first saw it.

WEB:
Web viewing is better than i expected. i did not completely know what to expect when i got it i knew it was going to be something in between  Lynx and IE probably leaning towards the lynx side of that spectrum.  So it surprised me when it functioned fairly well.

Though this does not mean there are still many bugs in it. for instance i expected facebook to work. well it does not really. atleast on mine with the update 3.0.1  www.facebook.com freezes when i try to zoom in on the page or after i login it will freeze and i will have to do a reboot of the kindle.
if i go to the m.facebook.com (mobile version of the site) the input boxes to login do not allow me to input text.

though if you are able to login on the normal facebook page and select remember me. then before or after it crashes go to the m.facebook.com page you are able to view the site. but still not able to update your status or comment on comments.

along with the speed of the 3g is not really the best but it is really nice to have on the go.
here are some of my bookmarks that i found very useful:
http://en.m.wikipedia.org  (mobile version of wikipedia)
http://www.google.com/m (mobile version of google)
http://m.blb.org  (bible/dictionary/concordance/etc.)
http://images.google.com/m
http://news.google.com/m
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/h.html
http://newadvent.org/cathen/ (works well with the kindle article mode)
books.google.com/m (mobile version of google books)
docs.google.com/m
for more links check out mobileread

MP3/audio books
the mp3 player on the kindle is well not really a player at all for the most part it just plays in the background. you never seen the song that is playing or anything you do not get to choice which song you like to play it picks one randomly.  (this is if you put the files in the music folder)

if you put the files in the audible folder you get something completely different. you have the options to select each song though problem is that you can't do anything else when listening to the song/book.

 i will be adding more thoughts on this in the coming days. i will try to share what i learned about the kindle 3 and how to make using it a lot more user friendly.

if you like a specific section or like to know if something works or a site works let me know i can test before you buy. if you want pictures of how it looks on a specific site or a mobile version let me know. 

if you have a great site that works well on the kindle 3 let us know normal or mobile versions. 


**UPDATE**

After running the kindle out of battery the next day and restarting the kindle i went to m.facebook.com and it allowed me to input on the site which makes me happy. so i am guessing you have to reboot the kindle after the update that or run till out of battery.
though some times it will stop working if that happons try touch.facebook.com it will work just as well if not better than the m.facebook.

ps hope you enjoyed this review on the kindle 3
have safe surfing from the staff at local tech repair

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