Kindle DX : great reader… but not quite there yet
As a biology graduate student, I suppose I am part of Amazon’s target audience for the Kindle DX. This review is geared towards others in academia who are looking for a PDF ereader. I have never owned an ereader before; my main reason for buying this is to have easy reading access to my PDF library (1000+) which consists of journal articles, grants, books, etc. After playing around with the Kindle, I find that for this purpose, it doesn’t quite live up to my expectations.
Pros:- The e-ink screen is gorgeous and definitely replicates a real ink-and-paper reading experience. Also, navigation and page turns aren’t as slow as I was expecting and are not particularly distracting.- PDF rendering is great and very accurate, even for complicated documents with many pictures/tables/graphs. Even previously annotated and modified PDFs (from my tablet PC) display correctly, with all my handwritten notes and highlights. It takes a few seconds to load (more for larger files), but page turns are fast.- In portrait mode, normal letter size documents like journal articles look great and are very readable. The margin-cropping feature works well, and I haven’t had major issues with the font size.- The build quality is terrific. It’s very thin and feels solid and well put together. The buttons and joystick controller are a little annoying (too stiff or not enough "click") but otherwise, it’s a good-looking and very functional reader.
Cons:- NO FOLDERS OR OTHER ORGANIZATION SYSTEM! This is a huge flaw for me and may result in my returning the Kindle if there isn’t a firmware upgrade in the works. So my 1000+ PDF files can be copied in their normal folders to the main Documents folder of the Kindle with no problem (they stay organized on the Kindle USB drive)… but then there is no organization of the files on the actual Kindle display. It becomes one huge list of all the files, which you can sort by title, date added, or author (although author is very rarely included in the metadata). True, you can search the titles but this lack of folders is extremely inconvenient for when I need a particular paper but don’t remember the specifics well enough to search for it. It’s really ridiculous there isn’t something as basic as folders on a gadget that Amazon hopes to sell to academia. Or even for non-academics, if Amazon is touting the large internal storage for downloading and holding tons of books, then they really need to include an organization system for handling those books.- The landscape display mode is not optimal for PDFs with 2-columns or large graphics. The accelerometer works well (maybe too sensitively), but the portrait mode just doesn’t suit these types of PDFs. You can’t scroll, so the display just chops up the pages, oftentimes in the middle of a graphic. So you would need to flip the page back and forth in order to read columns or, for example, reference a legend/description for a large figure that was chopped into two pages. Portrait mode is readable for me but I can imagine that small graph and figure text might be a problem for some and that trying to magnify via landscape mode would be highly annoying.- There is absolutely no annotation/note-taking feature for PDFs. I had read another review somewhere which stated that notes can be added for whole pages, rather than within the text; this isn’t true, and notes can’t be added in any way. Yes, the kindle can be a good PDF reader for students and professionals, but some sort of note-taking is also essential. For books and newspapers, the kindle DX does this beautifully and adds a txt file with your notes on its USB drive, which you can then easily access on your computer. Even a really basic notes feature (e.g. one note per entire document) would be better than nothing.
So the Kindle DX may be worth it if you want a highly portable reader with great PDF rendering and battery life. It’s definitely much better than trying to read PDFs on my iphone or netbook. Besides academic stuff, I also read a huge amount of fiction so I will definitely get a lot of use out of it. However, it’s still far from perfect, and I’m really hoping Amazon is working on a firmware update that will resolve some of the issues I have with it. If you’re just looking for a novel reader, then stick w/ the more portable kindle 2.
So cmon Amazon, if you really expect this to become popular with students/professionals, then fix these blaring issues! The hardware is great - fix the software (can it really be that hard to add folders??).
As a biology graduate student, I suppose I am part of Amazon’s target audience for the Kindle DX. This review is geared towards others in academia who are looking for a PDF ereader. I have never owned an ereader before; my main reason for buying this is to have easy reading access to my PDF library (1000+) which consists of journal articles, grants, books, etc. After playing around with the Kindle, I find that for this purpose, it doesn’t quite live up to my expectations.
Pros:- The e-ink screen is gorgeous and definitely replicates a real ink-and-paper reading experience. Also, navigation and page turns aren’t as slow as I was expecting and are not particularly distracting.- PDF rendering is great and very accurate, even for complicated documents with many pictures/tables/graphs. Even previously annotated and modified PDFs (from my tablet PC) display correctly, with all my handwritten notes and highlights. It takes a few seconds to load (more for larger files), but page turns are fast.- In portrait mode, normal letter size documents like journal articles look great and are very readable. The margin-cropping feature works well, and I haven’t had major issues with the font size.- The build quality is terrific. It’s very thin and feels solid and well put together. The buttons and joystick controller are a little annoying (too stiff or not enough "click") but otherwise, it’s a good-looking and very functional reader.
Cons:- NO FOLDERS OR OTHER ORGANIZATION SYSTEM! This is a huge flaw for me and may result in my returning the Kindle if there isn’t a firmware upgrade in the works. So my 1000+ PDF files can be copied in their normal folders to the main Documents folder of the Kindle with no problem (they stay organized on the Kindle USB drive)… but then there is no organization of the files on the actual Kindle display. It becomes one huge list of all the files, which you can sort by title, date added, or author (although author is very rarely included in the metadata). True, you can search the titles but this lack of folders is extremely inconvenient for when I need a particular paper but don’t remember the specifics well enough to search for it. It’s really ridiculous there isn’t something as basic as folders on a gadget that Amazon hopes to sell to academia. Or even for non-academics, if Amazon is touting the large internal storage for downloading and holding tons of books, then they really need to include an organization system for handling those books.- The landscape display mode is not optimal for PDFs with 2-columns or large graphics. The accelerometer works well (maybe too sensitively), but the portrait mode just doesn’t suit these types of PDFs. You can’t scroll, so the display just chops up the pages, oftentimes in the middle of a graphic. So you would need to flip the page back and forth in order to read columns or, for example, reference a legend/description for a large figure that was chopped into two pages. Portrait mode is readable for me but I can imagine that small graph and figure text might be a problem for some and that trying to magnify via landscape mode would be highly annoying.- There is absolutely no annotation/note-taking feature for PDFs. I had read another review somewhere which stated that notes can be added for whole pages, rather than within the text; this isn’t true, and notes can’t be added in any way. Yes, the kindle can be a good PDF reader for students and professionals, but some sort of note-taking is also essential. For books and newspapers, the kindle DX does this beautifully and adds a txt file with your notes on its USB drive, which you can then easily access on your computer. Even a really basic notes feature (e.g. one note per entire document) would be better than nothing.
So the Kindle DX may be worth it if you want a highly portable reader with great PDF rendering and battery life. It’s definitely much better than trying to read PDFs on my iphone or netbook. Besides academic stuff, I also read a huge amount of fiction so I will definitely get a lot of use out of it. However, it’s still far from perfect, and I’m really hoping Amazon is working on a firmware update that will resolve some of the issues I have with it. If you’re just looking for a novel reader, then stick w/ the more portable kindle 2.
So cmon Amazon, if you really expect this to become popular with students/professionals, then fix these blaring issues! The hardware is great - fix the software (can it really be that hard to add folders??).
By bobbi
KindleDX: Color Conversions on PDF
I just received my Kindle DX. I am a prior Kindle and current Kindle2 user. Why did I buy the Kindle DX? I purchased it primarily to read technical programming books which are so frequently distributed in PDF format now. Reading technical books in the Kindle/Kindle2 frequently did not work well because diagrams and code snippets were virtually unreadable. The first book that I tried to read on the Kindle DX was a programming book on the Android platform, "Hello, Android" by Ed Burnette. It was amazingly easy to copy the PDF from my computer to the Kindle and the reading experience on the Kindle DX was much better than on the Kindle2; however, there is an issue when a book uses a lot of different colors in its text. In the case of this book, they had to make serious revisions for the latest version of Android. As a result, they used color to denote revised sections. Unfortunately, some of the colors are so light when translated to gray scale that they are very difficult to read. So, the lack of color on the electronic "ink" strikes again.
By Cynthia Jeness
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