Gadgetory

hey guys it's Brandon Minnemann from pocketnow.com and this is part one of the video review of the Amazon Kindle here we have the Kindle in its case it's a very soft material not sure if it's leather yet it feels really nice it does a good job at protecting the device and it is secured by a piece of elastic here opening it up we have the Kindle of course now a lot of people were complaining that reading with the case on isn't a good idea because the Kindle constantly falls out it's only secured by these two flaps well if you read the instruction manual you'll find that there's a clip here meant to hold the Kindle in more securely if you would insert it properly and this is how you do it you slide it over to the left you push it down kind of hard and slide it a little bit to the right and what happens is that the Kindle is in place and it's kind of locked in place so that's a good little tip I don't like reading with it with the cover on I kind of like the minimalist approach with just having the Kindle here in my hand without all the extra material around it so here's the Kindle let's take a look at the hardware starting on the right here we have the next page button and it's also over here the next page button and then above that is a previous page button now as you can imagine if I'm using the Kindle and I want to go and pick it up I'm gonna grab it from over here which may accidentally depress the next page button and that's happened a lot to me so I have to think about how I pick it up before I pick it up and usually I just grab it here at the bottom and then I avoid accidentally pressing these page forward or back buttons below the page next button is the back button which does the same thing that it would do on a cell phone it goes to the previous screen to the left of that is a selector wheel it's not a scroll wheel the Kindle cannot scroll although sometimes I wish it could and it controls a little chrome looking selector here we'll take a look at that later but this is uh this this wheel here has a nice rubbery coating so it catches nicely with your thumb and it's easy to operate now this keyboard is a very simple one and you're not going to can you speed record records by typing on and though that's not really the point the point is to be able to input a few words at a time perhaps you're searching for your favorite favorite author or the name of a book and I find it very usable there is a delay when you type you'll see that in another review that I'll do in a few days that when you type a letter there's about a half a second delay of when you see it on the screen and that's not really a big deal also on the keyboard you have a button that controls the size of the text on the screen there are six choices that you have which is better than the Sony Reader which only has three then there's a search button which will actually search many places at one time so it'll search the book the Kindle Store and Wikipedia if you want it to the left of that is the home button takes you back to the home screen and everything else is pretty much standard here let's flip it over to the back on the back in the upper left we have the power on/off button and the wireless on/off button which I like to keep off unless I'm buying something now in the beginning I found it kind of inconvenient to have to turn over the device just to turn it on though you'll realize that it's as easy as reaching your hand back there and flipping it on just feeling for the raised chrome button here and it's it's easy to do so that's not that big of a deal as with anything you get used to it here's the speaker if we take off the cover you can see the battery and it looks like a cell phone battery it probably is it's 1538 milli 30 milliamp hours it's user replaceable which is good here's the reset hole should the device freeze and this is where you put the SD card if you want to add a little bit of expansion there just want to put the keep the cover back on sometimes this takes a an effort to get it to lock into place okay let's flip over to the bottom over here on the left is a standard 3.5 millimeter headphone jack to the right of that is a mini USB port this little guy is the indicator light for charging and right next to that is the charging port you can't charge through many USB it uses this proprietary charging solution so you'll have to have the Kindle charger with you no matter where you go you can't just use your cell phone charger to charge the device so the right of that is volume up and down if you're listening to an mp3 or an audiobook I haven't done that yet and that's pretty much it as you've noticed by now the device is shaped like a wedge and my guess is that they assume that a lot of people will use their left hand to read the weight is distributed a bit towards the left and if you use your left hand then you have access to the previous page button and the next page button the way I like to read is I hold it down here and I kind of just move my finger over there to change the page or I'd lean it up against something that's sturdy and you know kind of use my hand to change the change the page like that so that is the Kindle and a walk through of the the features of the hardware and next we'll actually turn the device on and take a look at how it functions that's it for now