Amazon Kindle DX was announced back at the beginning of May, but it’s taken until now for the first of the oversized ebook readers to reach buyers’ hands. The Kindle DX begins shipping this week, promising more E Ink real estate, more memory, and more file-type support on top of the Kindle 2’s existing Whispernet wireless and other features. Is bigger necessarily better? SlashGear put on our reading glasses and set to finding out.
The differences between the Kindle 2 and the new Kindle DX are obvious: a 9.7-inch E Ink monochrome display dominates the front panel, offering around 2.5x the space of the smaller ebook reader and squashing the QWERTY keyboard into tic-tac tininess at the bottom. Amazon Kindle DX has obviously worked hard to minimize the screen’s impact on the overall chassis, with mixed results. It’s a scant 0.02-inches thicker than the Kindle 2, at 0.38-inches, with a metal back-plate lending stiffness, but the left-side page controls have been dropped.
Make sure to click through for the full review, photo gallery and unboxing/walkthrough video of the Amazon Kindle DX.
That means that anybody who automatically goes to use their left-hand to turn pages (and that’s not just the left-handed among us) will have to either retrain themselves or follow Amazon’s advice and flip the display 180-degrees. Doing so obviously puts the keyboard and joystick out of easy reach, so it’s not an ideal solution.
Anybody planning on doing this regularly really should get into the habit of using the included USB 2.0 to micro-USB cable, though, as Amazon’s Whispernet conversion fees can quickly mount up. Shortly before they announced the Kindle DX, Amazon quietly changed their policy on wireless conversions: where previously they charged a fixed $0.10 per document, they now bill per megabyte. Files are rounded up to the nearest whole megabyte (MB), each charged at $0.15. Given that a typical research paper will range in size from under 1MB (which Amazon will round up) to perhaps 10-15MB depending on length, graphics and whether the original is in color or monochrome, you’re likely looking at least a dollar per conversion. Manual transfers via the USB cable (Amazon will also convert documents not natively supported and send them back to your email account) are free.
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