few months ago i bought kindle 3g. below what’s good and what’s bad about it.
overall i’m quite happy. kindle became my main reading device. it’s in my backpack all the time, with tens of unread articles/presentations etc. how do i use it? i grab interesting pdfs of the net and send them to my address @free.kindle.com; in turn, whenever wifi is available kindle downloads them and stores on local flash media. this is quite handy method, i dont need to dock/undock the device every time i want to add some new content.
there’s a lot of web articles i’d like to read later so i’ve hacked small php script that uses wysiwyg html editor to which i paste the content and wkhtmltopdf to render html produced by ckeditor to pdf and mailed [technical sidenote – i had to use –lowquality option for wkhtmltopdf, without it some pdfs were displayed truncated in the middle on the kindle]. i usually grab the interesting part not whole web page. this works surprisingly well – formatting is preserved, inline images too.
some complains:
- 3g part… well in theory kindle should give you unlimited web browsing access without additional fees over built in 3g modem/sim-card. too bad in countries like sweden, spain, portugal this access is limited only to wikipedia. current list of countries without the limitation: here; website that follows coverage across the world: here.
- device is not super-fast. when reading more complex pdfs it can take 20-30 seconds to render the page, but in most cases it’s 1-2 sec – not bad.
good side:
- screen is great for reading in sunlight
- battery lives indeed ~2 weeks
- it runs linux… and can be rooted. although i did not bother to do it yet