Kindle WiFi

UPS tracking showed "Out for delivery" at 03:30 in the dark hours, but delivery was not made until 17:00. It took UPS 13.5 hours for the 16-mile delivery. But, it was well worth the wait. I took two photos with my BB Pearl despite its lousy resolution. I simply could not wait to use a better camera.

The Kindle WiFi (K3) and the Kindle 2 (K2) are shown here on my homemade cover. K3 occupies the side where I have my iPod Touch. It should come in handy for dual-column PDF reading.

Setting up the WiFi was easy. And, the new browser is so much more user friendly and the WiFi update is as fast as my netbook. Both PDF files and browser displays have the same zoom and pan functions. The difference between native PDF and Webkit browser and the K2's PDF and browser is like night and day. The b/w graphics are nice and crisp. Well enough to obviate the need for my iPod Touch.

Shown side-by side here in the lower photo. The new high contrast e-Ink display's text rivals (may even be superior to) the paperback (not shown) that I used as my benchmark. PDF handling is noticeably faster than that on the K2.

Kindle 3 displays Chinese well, something that was missing in K2 (unless I jailbreak it to work with Unicode). I set up the browser to view Google and BBC news in Chinese and the Chinese language World Journal. I believe it would only be a matter of time before Kindle books in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean would become available in order to meet consumer needs. Most likely, Baidu may start to offer *.prc or *.mobi versions of Chinese books first, because the potential Chinese market would be huge. Amazon would be well advised to start offering *.azw versions of Chinese and other character-based Asian language books.

Browsing the Web on the 6" b/w is quite nice when compared to the 3.5" Touch. Trade off is between size/cost and color/multitouch. For meeting my needs, I prefer to use the K3 to using the Touch, because I don't really lookmuch at photos or colored graphics. I could always use the Touch to view photos and graphs when needed.