Amazon Kindle

Description

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

• Linux-2.6.10?
• 3.7 V, 1750 mAh lithium polymer
• Freescale 532 MHz, ARM-11?
• 4Gb storage
• 16-level grayscale electronic paper?
• Atheros AR6102G 802.11bg WiFi chip?
• USB 2.0 port (micro-B connector)
• 3.5 mm stereo headphone jack
• built-in speakers and microphone?
• 190 × 123 × 8.51 mm
• 240 g
• Browser based on webkit

Software: Kindle 3.0 (515460094)

Links

• on Wikipedia
• official support page

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 turned off, but I'm not sure I can load my own "screensaver" images.

Tips

• 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
• To play/pause music: alt+space
• To go to next song: alt+f

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

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: I don't know the equivalent to the "411" code of previous Kindle versions. Hopefully you can find the serial on the packaging as well.

Software upgrade

I can see there is a new version here: 3.0.1
But in Menu/Settings/Menu the option to update the Kindle is grayed out. Apparently I need to register to their store first.