My wife surprised me yesterday with a brand new Amazon Kindle. Check out the link to get an overview. This is a great device that does a lot more than I initially realized.
There is a tremendous amount of content available for the Kindle. Unlimited really. As of the time of this post there are 135,583 books, 20 newspapers, 16 magazines, and a slew of blogs available from Amazon’s web site. All of these are delivered to your Kindle via Whispernet, which is Amazon’s name for the EVDO wireless network supplied by Sprint.
You can also access the Internet (for free). The built-in web browser is not as full-featured as Safari or Firefox, but is adequate. I’ve pulled up things on Google Maps. I’ve sent and received email via Gmail. I’ve read dozens of articles on Wikipedia. You get the point.
You can convert your own reading material and put it on your Kindle. You can do this yourself or you can email it to Amazon and they will convert it for you. It’s extraordinarily easy to use.
You can also play music and view pictures on the Kindle, but that is really not it’s strong point and I recommend you use your iPod for those tasks. In fact, I think of the Kindle as the iPod for books.
The gray-scale electronic ink display is beautiful. It is not a lighted display — you need ambient light. But it’s sharp and clear and looks great, even in very bright sunlight. If you encounter any unknown word while you are reading you can scroll the cursor to that line and press a button. The Kindle will display definitions for every work on that line.
You can flip around from one book or another and the Kindle remembers exactly where you left off in each book. You can highlight arbitrary line ranges and the Kindle will remember them. You can tag lines with your own notes.
If you get the impression that I’m impressed with the Amazon Kindle, you are correct.