My Kindle DX experience

First of all, I want to say that the Kindle DX experience is great. But do not expect this device to behave like a Handheld device or a small computer. It is not a computer: it is a reading device. So, think twice before buying it : you may first really wonder why you would spend more than $400 for such a device.

The Kindle DX has a very good form factor for reading more than the books you bought : the screen size is big enough to allow you to read technical papers or powerpoint-converted documents. And at last the acrobat format is fully functional : plug the Kindle to your computer and drop whatever you like !

Note that the Kindle Dx is a nice piece of compact technology. But its weight (same as a Best seller big book) will certainly push you to put it on your legs after few minutes of holding it. This is especially true when you want to write something with its keyboard: the weight will give you hard time to wear it at the same time typing text. But the keyboard is small and good quality. It doesn’t take much space, which is a good point: the rest being used by the screen.

Despite the fact that many features are missing, Kindle DX is such a very nice device !

The excellent reading experience; the free access to internet and the freedom of reading any of your PDF/Text document makes this device worth its price if... if you are used to spend of lot of time reading documents and browsing for information. In fact, one could even take a big advantage of this device without buying any E-book...

Let’s just hope that Amazon will provide a Firmware update with some missing features as soon as possible.

Very good features :

• Display size for reading. Perfect size for technical documents
• E-Ink : being able to access information and read you documents outdoor is such a pleasure.
• PDF documents. Technical papers (like white papers from research areas etc.) are perfectly rendered.
• Web browser : either “basic mode” or “Desktop mode” are nice. Blog-style sites (Ubergizmo...) or Wiki sites (Wikipedia) are the most compliant. Other sites are still working pretty well. I can check my google emails and write short answers (long answers slows down the refresh, because of the E-Ink technology display) without any issue.

Missing features, or features that would be most welcome:

• No grouping of PDF documents. Even if you copied your PDF documents in various sub-folders, they appear as one single list. It can become a problem if you stored thousands of them
• No selection within a PDF document. As opposed to a Ebook or text file where you can highlight and lookup the word into the dictionary, PDF documents don’t offer this feature at all.
• No annotations on highlighted text
• General search feature not working for PDF documents. Text and books are indexed so that you can perform a global search and get the list of documents/books that contain your keywords. PDF documents aren’t part of this search. The only way to search in a PDF file is to first load it...
• No Zoom in a PDF document; No way to change the size of letters. The only way to zoom is to rotate the Kindle (Auto mode or by explicitly asking for the rotation...)
• No grouping of Web-browser bookmarks. Again, this can become a real issue if you have many
• No Synthetic Voice for PDF documents... but I can understand that it can be a hard problem to solve. Especially if the PDF document contains equations and other crazy keywords !
• No way to browse mp3 files. I would have loved to get this feature for a specific purpose : listen to recorded conferences while reading the slides (converted in PDF) !
• No picture viewer. Although the display is in grayscale, I personally like this. It gives an artistic touch (if you did a correct contrast setup and maybe post-processed the image with some patterns).
• No way to choose which image will be displayed when turned off. Currently, the Kindle display very nice images when Off. It would be cool if we could choose our own image... so the Kindle would be usefull even when off : as a decoration in your living room :-) !
• No touch screen

Frustrations:

• Although I didn’t use it so much, yet... I got few random crashes (web browser, pdf document...). Firmware update will help
• Missing features when Reading PDF documents : Font size; indexed search; Highlighting; lookup to dictionnary; zoom...
• No way to choose the mp3 from a list
• Getting lost in the list of documents stored in the Kindle. After 20 documents uploaded, it becomes difficult to quickly access them.
• PDF load time can be long