The Kindle 2 - ReKindled

As you may already know, Amazon is now shipping the new Kindle 2 e-book reader. To make things easier for my readers, I’ve compiled all of the information necessary in order to make a decision on whether or not to buy this sexy new gadget, including my own hands-on review. If in the end you do end up buying, please be a good samaritan and help support my site by purchasing it here; after all, a lot of long hours went into creating and maintaining this article. Thank you for your support!

Product Specifications

General	Launch	November 19th, 2007	February 9th, 2009
	Dimensions (LxWxH)	19.1 × 13.5 × 1.8 cm	134.62 x 9.144 x 203.2 mm
	Weight	292g	289.16g
	Color(s)	White	White
	Included Accessories	Power adapter, USB 2.0 cable, Book cover	Power adapter, USB 2.0 cable
Display	Size	6” diagonal	6” diagonal
	Resolution (HxW)	600x800	600x800
	DPI	170	167
	Colors	Grayscale (4 shades)	Grayscale (16 shades)
	Medium	Electronic Paper	Electronic Paper
Hardware	CPU	400MHz Marvell PXA255	532MHz ARM-11 Freescale MCIMX31L
	Memory	64MB	64MB
	Storage	256MB (180MB Avail.)	2GB (1.4 GB Avail.)
	SD Expansion Slot	Yes	No
Software	OS	Linux 2.6.10 based	Linux 2.6.22 based
Battery	Type	3.7V, 1530mAh lithium polymer, BA1001 model	3.7V, 1530mAh lithium polymer, S11S01A model
	Life	3 days w/ wireless on	4.5 days w/ wireless on
	Charge Time	2 Hours	4 Hours
	Removable	Yes	No
Input	Keyboard	QWERTY	QWERTY
	Navigation	Select wheel, next/prev/back buttons	5-way control button, next/prev/back/home/menu buttons
Audio	Speakers	Mono	Stereo
	TTS (Text-To-Speech)	No	Yes
Connectivity	Carrier	Sprint	Sprint
	Modem	EVDO/CDMA AnyDATA wireless modem w/ fallback to 1xRTT	EVDO/CDMA AnyDATA wireless modem w/ fallback to 1xRTT
	USB	USB 2.0 port	USB 2.0 port
	Headphone	3.5 mm stereo jack	3.5 mm stereo jack
	Power	AC Adapter	AC Adapter
Media	Supported Formats	Kindle (.azw), Text (.txt), Unprotected Mobipocket (.mobi, .prc), MP3 (.mp3), Audible (.aa)	Kindle (.azw), Text (.txt), Unprotected Mobipocket (.mobi, .prc), MP3 (.mp3), Audible (.aa, .aax)

 Kindle 2 vs Kindle 1 - Quick Comparison

Thinner: At .36 inches, it’s 25% thinner than an iPhone

Quicker: Pages now turn 20% faster

Lasts Longer: Lasts 25%  longer

Easier to read: Displays 16 shades of gray (versus 4)

More Storage: Can store approximately 1,500 books

Better navigation: With the new 5-way controller

Better dictionary: Automatic definitions when you highlight a word

Text-To-Speech: Have your Kindle read your book to you in a male/female voice

Less Fuss: Harder to accidentally press a button

2 Kindle or not 2 Kindle?

Owners of the original Kindle will absolutely love the new Kindle 2. Gone is the boxy odd-looking contraption that was angled to approach the feel of a book but in practice simply felt wrong. Let’s not even talk about the slider / wheel navigation system that seemed better suited to navigating the book’s menu rather than its pages. Oh, and remember the horrific button placement that led to the constant annoying accidental page-turning every time you picked it up? Well goodbye to the old and in with the new!

You had me at “Hello”

The Kindle 2 comes bundled with a charger and USB 2.0 cable. As I took it out of its packaging, I immediately thought “iBook”. It looked like an oversized iPod; white, thin, sleek and amazingly light yet sturdy. The Kindle 2 has a very “clean” look to it, as if the design geniuses at Apple hand a hand in its creation. The corners are now rounded instead of angular and the keyboard has been revamped to look more like a regular keyboard in its arrangement; the keys no longer rectangular but small and round. The navigation buttons have been completely overhauled, the wheel and slider completely gone and replaced with a 5-way controller that only ever-so-slightly protrudes from its casing. The buttons no longer occupy the entire length of the device, instead they are much smaller and feel tighter, so they’re harder to trigger if you accidentally press on them. The slider power/sleep switch and 3.5mm stereo headphone jack are located along the top side, volume control on the right, and USB port on the bottom.

The back is flat, smooth brushed-aluminum with stereo speakers at the bottom. One thing missing is the SD slot, but this shouldn’t be a deal-breaker considering the much improved 2GB storage capacity and the ability to offload content that you no longer need. Frequent flyers will surely miss the ability to be able to easily switch wireless mode on or off since this functionality is now purely software-driven through a menu option. Also, the battery is now inaccessible a-la iPhone/iPod but when the time comes Amazon will replace it for free assuming it’s in warranty; otherwise they charge $59. For those Kindle owners wondering how they would be able to reboot without removing the battery, don’t worry; you can do so by holding the power switch for 14 seconds.

Test-drive

After charging it for four hours, I was pleasantly surprised as the charging indicator located at the bottom of the device goes green, indicating a full charge; this is one of the many design touches that makes the Kindle 2 a much more enjoyable experience than its predecessor. I turn on the Kindle 2 and skim through the user-guide, navigate through the menus, and experiment a bit in order to acclimatize myself to the new feel. The first thing I notice is that the display is so much crisper thanks to the 16 shades of gray, especially when viewing images such as the screensaver that appears when the device goes to sleep. The fonts are smoother than ever and I genuinely felt awed at how good it looked to the eyes; it genuinely felt as if I was reading a sheet of actual paper - newspaper to be precise. The display screen itself is nowhere near as hardy as the iPhone/iPod, so carrying it unprotected in your backpack is definitely not recommended and will surely result in a scratched surface. I have heard of a blogger that left his Kindle 2 under his pillow and as he climbed into bed he leaned on his pillow with his elbow and cracked the screen. Morale of the story: Invest in a protective cover for your Kindle 2.

Navigating is much easier now thanks to the new 5-way controller, allowing you to nudge it in the direction that you want the cursor to move and pressing down when you want to select something. The screen refreshes somewhat faster now (20% faster) as is evident while navigating your cursor through the screen or flipping from page to page. A cool feature I’ve noticed while navigating through the words on a page is that the definition of the highlighted word appears automatically at the bottom of the screen. Further experimentation with the dictionary revealed the newfound ability to lookup any word in the dictionary, not just the highlighted one.

The search button is gone and in its place is a significantly improved search system accessible from the menu. Selecting the Search option takes you to a separate page with many different search options, including the abilities to search the Kindle store, Google, Dictionary, Wikipedia and Web in addition to your Kindle 2 content. You can also access search capabilities by simply typing from wherever you are, bringing up a small text search area at the bottom of the screen allowing you to search on the fly.

Newspaper subscription is no longer the laughable affair it was with the original Kindle, so much so that I’ve actually cancelled my dead-tree subscriptions in favor of the wireless delivery. Aside from the obvious environmentally friendly aspects, the fact that I no longer have to deal with all those piles of newspaper lying around occupying valuable real-estate is such a relief, and I don’t have to worry about whether or not my newspapers are going to be there every morning or if one of my less virtuous neighbors is enjoying it instead. The front page contains a two-column list of sections (eg. Front Page, International, Sports, Real Estate, etc…) that also displays how many articles are contained within. Selecting a section results in a list of articles containing a brief two or three-line excerpt. Selecting an article allows you to read the article which can be browsed using the Previous/Next page buttons. You can also quickly skip to other articles by using the 5-way controller. There are no ads to wade through, keeping the newspaper content compact and easy to navigate.

Blog readers will enjoy the ability to subscribe to and browse through their favorite blogs on the Kindle 2. There are a few gripes when it comes to handling the presentation, but nothing that a software update can’t fix. For example, there’s currently no way to tell apart which parts of the blog you’ve read and haven’t read which I find just a tad bit annoying, but it’s nothing that can’t be fixed via a software update should it prove to be an issue to a majority of users.

Extras

Text-To-Speech is a much-touted feature of the new Kindle 2, but I’m not really sure who’s going to use this since visually-impaired people will still need to look at the screen in order to activate it. Powered by technology from Nuance (the makers of Dragon Naturally Speaking), the Kindle 2 offers the user a choice of male or female voice as well as the ability to choose a reading speed. The voices are really not bad, but you can tell they’re computerized. Pages turn automatically as the device reads to you, but the implementation isn’t perfect since the computer doesn’t know where to pause at times. Text-To-Speech is a feature that was initially advertized as being always accessible, but Amazon has recently conceded to the Author’s Guild and will be modifying the Kindle 2 in order to allow authors to disable this feature, preventing users from having the device read to them.

The Kindle 2 comes with the same experimental features as the original Kindle, namely the browser and mp3 player, but they haven’t been enhanced and remain awful to use. The browser is only useable on the simplest websites and the only control you have over the mp3 player is the volume.

Amazon has provided a service for converting content to a format readable by your Kindle, but it’s not perfect and for anything other than simple documents I would suggest reading my article on Converting content to your Kindle instead. For a $0.10 fee, you can send the file you want converted to youramazonusername@kindle.com and it will be delivered to your Kindle wirelessly. They also offer a free service where you can send the file you want converted to youramazonusername@free.kindle.com , but they will email the converted content to you instead and it’s up to you to copy it from your PC to your Kindle. Keep in mind that their conversion service will only accept Microsoft Word, PDF, HTML, TXT, JPEG, GIF, PNG and BMP files.

Conclusion

I do a lot of technical reading and subscribe to a couple of newspapers as well as my favorite blogs, and the Kindle 2 hasn’t failed to impress. The ability to free myself from the physical bulk is such a relief, and the fact that the Kindle 2 is so much more useable now turned me into a true believer. The steep price is definitely an issue for most people, and I still believe that content should cost much less. For example, one of my technical books is listed on Amazon with a list-price of $49.99 but priced at $38.99; the Kindle edition, on the other hand, is priced at a whopping $31.99. That’s a savings of only $7 versus the hard-copy; not a real incentive to buy. Kindle editions of the New York Times Best Sellers and New Releases, on the other hand, usually go for only $9.99, so you may save on average a whopping 50% or more.

Amazon has listened to its customers and delivered a completely redesigned interface that works. If you can afford the price-tag, then you can’t go wrong with what may possibly be the iPod of e-book readers. When you're ready, buy it here!