rob’s cryptic life

Happy Kindle Day To Me

My Amazon Kindle arrived today — thanks Julie! — and I’m eagerly putting it through its paces for an upcoming Gadgeteer review. Earlier this year I reviewed the Sony Reader and I’m looking forward to comparing the two. (The Kindle is definitely in the lead so far.)

I don’t want to spoil my review too much by talking about the Kindle here yet, but I do have a few first impressions.

Amazon Whispernet (the Kindle’s wireless service) actually works at my home, and quite well at that. Considering that it’s supposed to be based on Sprint EVDO, this surprises me greatly. I suspect it’s roaming on Verizon, unless Sprint lit up a tower close by very recently. If it’s roaming, I have to give Amazon props for allowing that — it makes the Kindle much more useful for those of us who live a bit outside the city.

A hardware tidbit: check the system/logs directory of the Kindle’s internal storage. Mine had a boot log showing that it uses a Linux 2.6 kernel on a 400 MHz PXA255 with 64MB of RAM, and EVDO module from AnyData. The software seems to be Java based with a plugin architecture so they can add more applications later, like the ones under the “Experimental” menu. Maybe someone will figure out how to hack it for user-installed apps, though I don’t have any more hope for that than I do for it on the iPhone.

I’m also pleased by the fact that the Kindle has native support for unencrypted PalmDocs. Although the Kindle’s native format for DRMed books is something new, its format for unencrypted documents is MobiPocket, which is essentially HTML wrapped in a PalmDoc container. Plain text PalmDocs work just fine too. Just make sure the file name extension is .prc, not .pdb — just go ahead and rename it, as the file format is the same inside. Other than plain text, those are the only formats it supports directly right now, but at least Amazon offers a conversion service which is free via email, or 10 cents if you email it a document to be sent wirelessly to the Kindle. Or, on Windows, you can use Mobipocket’s own conversion tools. From where I sit, this is far easier than dealing with the Sony because all of my books are on my Mac, and many of them are already PalmDocs.

And yes, this probably means that Pyrite Publisher is about to rise from the grave. I think this incarnation will be a Kindle-supporting e-book librarian though…

Mobile and PDAs :: Amazon, E-Books, Gadgeteer, Hardware, Kindle, Mobipocket, Pyrite, Pyrite Publisher
:: 6:57 PM November 26th, 2007 #