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 speaker
• 190 × 123 × 8.51 mm
• 240 g
• Browser based on webkit

Links

• on Wikipedia

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.

Openness

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

Other features

• Password lockable
• 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.

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