Metropol

Pete wrote:Do they do colour e-ink yet?

Yes but I don't think there is any on sale.
The issue is with the refresh rate as it has to do 3 or 4 passes to make up the colours.

A colleague was telling me that he was just about to order a load of them to trial paperless meetings, using the Kindle to view a PDF of the paperwork for the meeting rather than a load of photocopies.

I have a Kindle which I use mainly for books... but thought I'd try and take some photos to demonstrate PDFs for you. My photography skills leave a lot to be desired, but it might give some idea.

An A4 journal article printed two-up vs the Kindle... I find this just a little too small to read comfortably:


Rotate the Kindle, and the text size is almost identical, and very easy to read... But I find zooming up and down the columns really very irritating:


A full-size one-column A4 document (text pt size 12) vs the Kindle... Obviously much smaller, but I find it eminently readable:


The same, with Kindle rotated. Again, very readable, and easy to navigate:


You can zoom further as required, but fitting to screen width probably works best. The next and previous page buttons take you approximately a "screen" at a time, so need for scrolling is minimal (except where the text is columned, and you have to jump back a few "screens" to get back to the top of the column. There's no re-flow option to turn two-columns into one, which is a bit of an omission.

Getting documents onto the Kindle is very easy - just forward the email you've received to your Kindle's email address, and they will appear as if by Pixie Magic.

Hope that's in some way helpful.

btw forgot to mention my Kindle finally arrived. Love the thing, it's so much easier than printing a bazillion pages every week.

Only gripe really is the fact it can't connect to enterprise wifi networks which means I can't email PDFs to it from on campus which is a bit crap. Hopefully this will be dealt with in a firmware update. Have sent them an email anyhow.

How does the 3G work on Kindles? The advert says that there's free 3G access with no contract. What network does it use? I assume it doesn't use a SIM card that you can put into a phone?

Inspector Sands wrote:How does the 3G work on Kindles? The advert says that there's free 3G access with no contract. What network does it use? I assume it doesn't use a SIM card that you can put into a phone?

Mine is the one without 3G however basically its an agreement between them and some of the networks but its all built in and doesn't use a sim as such. you can only connect to "whispernet" (i.e. the store, downloading your emailed documents and wikipedia for some reason) via 3g though, not the real internets which is wifi only.

The original kindle used Sprint in the US which was CDMA network however it has since moved over to GSM and AT&T (and of course the ability to work abroad). I've only managed to find one page that suggestsit uses Vodaphone over here but then other pages suggest that Orange and Voda weren't keen as they wanted to launch their own ebook readers.

So I have discovered, the day after the final hand in day for uni, that you can convert PDFs to kindle native format simply by using the subject "Convert" in your email to your @kindle.com address. This appears to work rather fabulously.

So yay at that, and tsk @ it not being known to be until yesterday.