Amazon Kindle

Description

Third generation Kindle in graphite color, released on August 27, 2010

• e-ink Pearl, 16-level grayscale, 600x800
• 4Gb storage
• Linux-2.6.26
• Freescale i.MX35 532 MHz (ARM 11)
• 3.7 V, 1750 mAh lithium polymer
• Atheros AR6102G 802.11bg WiFi chip?
• USB 2.0 port (micro-B connector), apparently master-capable
• 3.5 mm stereo headphone jack
• built-in speakers
• microphone ("This feature is not yet enabled and is for future use")
• 190 × 123 × 8.51 mm
• 240 g
• Browser based on webkit

Original software: Kindle 3.0 (515460094)

Links

• on Wikipedia
• on MobileRead
• official support page
• Manage your Kindle online

Review

Purely subjective :-)

e-Ink

I know the technology since it was in development within Philips Research and I'm really impressed by the quality they managed to achieved today (2010Q3).
Refresh is faster (but only for static or small animations, don't try to watch videos)
Contrast is better
Definition is unbelievably better, without any noticeable pixellisation
Greyscale management is excellent
I just noticed some slight problems (ghost images) when scrolling on a webpage because it attempts to refresh only locally the content

Wi-Fi

Very easy to connect but better to have a WPA PSK full of letters than full of numbers or other chars because if there is a keyboard for letters, other symbols must be entered via a virtual keyboard and a 5-way button, kind of cumbersome if your PSK is 63-digit long...
Possibility to configure manually a network, supports WPA2
Possibility to turn off Wi-Fi.

Browser

Via Wi-Fi you can search easily on Google & Wikipedia & you can surf any web page.
It's usualle more comfortable to set the browser in "article mode" rather than "web mode". Then it only displays the text.
Limitations: web browser cannot download other filetypes than .AZW, .PRC, .MOBI or .TXT, so even if it supports PDF it cannot download them :-(
Privacy: can clear its history, all cookies and can disable javascript.

Open source friendliness

Still to be evaluated.
88 pages of legal statement, giving a glimpse on the technologies used in this product:

• Java by Sun, Vocalizer for automotive by Nuance, PDF by Adobe, iType by Monotype
• under GPL: alsa, atheros driver, atk, base-passwd, bspatch, busybox, cairo, directfb, dosfstools, e2fsprogs, fuse, gdb, glib, glibc, gstreamer & gst-plugin-*, gtk gimp toolkit, ifupdown, iptables, libenchant, libgcrypt, libgnutls, libgpg-error, libltdl, libol, libpango, libproxy, libsoup, libstdc++, libvolumeid, linux, lrzsz, lzo, module-init-tools, mtd-utils, picocom, powertop, procps, syslog-ng, sysvinit, taglib, u-boot, udev, util-linux, wireless tools
• under BSD: bsdiff, bzip2m elektra, jdbm, klibc, libedit, libpcap, ncurses, ppp, wpa supplicant
• others: freetype, libjpeg, icu4j, d-bus, liboil, klibc, pixman, e-ink, openssl, ssleay, gifencoder, ntp, curl, fontconfig, libtiff, libxml2, libxslt, libexslt, bufferedrandomaccessfile, jfep, json simple, log4j, lucene, xerces,

Source code available here, about 190Mb for v3.0.1

Other features

• Password lockable (you can reset password by resetting the entire device, loosing all its content)
• TTS & voice guide
• Instant dictionary while reading (only in American English & British English?)
• playing mp3 while reading

Missing features

• You can write annotations while reading but I couldn't find a way to write notes out of that context, just as a Moleskine.
• Being able to choose the type of refresh for books & for browsing: right now page refresh on books is excellent and refresh on scrolling a webpage is poorer (probably because they wanted to limit power consumption & they assumed you'll scroll more often than turning pages. But I would prefer to have the choice.
• It displays nice engravings when sleeping, but I'm not sure I can load my own "screensaver" images.
• It could also display images when turned off but that option is not there.
• Collections can be created only when you've registered the product.
• No way to save webpages for offline reading. Would be great e.g. for Wikipedia articles
• Cannot browse local files through file://
• Cannot download pdfs from the browser

Tips

• I didn't pay attention that settings were on several pages...
• Turn off automatic backup of annotations & collections to amazon.com in the settings!
• To see the time (how to change it??), press the Menu key
• To see free storage, press Home then Menu keys (3105MB on a new device)
• To reboot: Home/Menu/Settings/Menu or disconnect from power and slide and maintain power switch for 15s
• To play/pause music: alt+space
• To go to next song: alt+f
• To put to sleep, slide and release the power switch or wait 10 mins of inactivity. Note that Wi-Fi seems to stay on so better to put it off before sleep.
• To turn it off, slide and maintain power switch for 7s till screen goes white.

Misc

• Packaging is made of recycled cardpaper, see also discarding info here

Comparisons

With a book

• = About same size & weight, thinner. Note that I had also a Kindle DX in hands and I find it too big & heavy for novels reading. But for tech docs it may help to have an increased display.
• + search function
• + reading in the bed with a torch :-) Because there is no mechanical parts like pages to turn, you can clip a small LED torch without messing with it each time you want to turn to the next page
• - Contrast is excellent compared to other technologies but paper & ink have still a largely better contrast
• - valuable = "stealable" & damageable... If you can leave your book unattended for a while when going to the restroom in a pub, or bring your book in extreme hiking, you can hardly do the same with your Kindle (or you're very rich)

With a computer

• + Better for concentration than reading on a computer as it's less easy to swap to a console, a chat box, a RSS aggregator, an email client and all those little stuffs that attracts you when you're in front of your computer ;-)

Third-Party

• G:RSS-Web: A Google Reader for Kindle and Nook
• Find free e-books
• MobileRead wiki

Exploring

USB storage device:

Disk /dev/sdb: 3282 MB, 3282272256 bytes
4 heads, 16 sectors/track, 100167 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 64 * 512 = 32768 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000
   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1               1      100167     3205336    b  W95 FAT32

DRM-free

Not yet tried

• see http://tips4linux.com/remove-drm-from-amazon-kindles-ebooks-using-linux/ to get the PID and to convert ebooks
• see http://kindletools.prestonlee.com/ to get the PID online
• getting the serial: it's visible on the Home/Menu/Settings page and on the packaging as well

Software upgrade

I can see there is a new version here: 3.0.1
After registration, after a while, once the device went to sleep, it downloaded & installed automatically the latest version, now: 3.0.1 (525120101).
For changes, see here
There are also experimental versions here
I'm now trying the 3.0.3

Jailbreak

Initial jailbreak

• Forum post here how to jailbreak & download files
  • kindle-jailbreak-0.4.N.zip#update_jailbreak_0.4.N_k3w_install.bin / Update your Kindle

Screen savers

See here

• kindle-ss-0.15.N.zip#update_ss_0.15.N_k3w_install.bin / Update your Kindle
• Drop 600x800 png or jpg into /media/Kindle/linkss/screensavers

Ideas & TODOs

• Export librarything books list to the Kindle. Maybe export as csv then format it as pdf or sth else?
  • For online list, see http://www.librarything.com/m/ -> save page as pdf from Firefox & import on Kindle?
• Export personal wiki as ebook