Gadgetory

hey guys it's Brandon minimun from pocketnow.com and this is part 2 of the video review of the Amazon Kindle now I'm gonna pick it up here and you'll notice something you see that the screen has a bit of a glare and that's unfortunate because often times when you're reading with the Kindle you're gonna have an overhead light source or be next to a lamp and having a glare can be bothersome if you catch it in the right angle it's not as Glary as say an iPhone but it's still you know it's still an annoyance anyway so let's turn it on the Kindle has a 6 inch screen the resolution is 800 by 600 the screen technology is called it's called an electro phoretic and display for the rest of us we call it II tink because it's made to look like ink on a page just like a real book and it does a pretty good job I'll give you a good example of that in a second to select things with the Kindle you use this selection wheel on the bottom right here you kind of drag your finger along it and this interesting looking Chrome I don't even know what to call it let's call it a chrome strip moves up and down and when you find what you want I'm gonna go to the tipping point up at the top you just press it inward and it selects it and here we are in the beginning of the tipping point and over here I have the actual book so we can kind of get an idea of how the contrast compares from the Kindle to an actual book I'm gonna get real close here the contrast is much greater on the Kindle than it is on a computer screen but it still could be improved I mean this is a first generation product that the back could be background could be whiter the text could be blacker maybe the next generation product will have even greater contrast I'm sure it will and and thereafter eventually we'll have a device that can literally replicate the look of paper but until then it does a good job to change the page as you know you press this next page button the screen flashes every time as it has to read your all itself now something I find a little bit of annoying is is that there's a lot of wasted space on the left here and on the top I feel like they could push the text into that area because as it is there's a limited amount of text that fit on one screen at a time let me show you the the kind of layout of every page you've got the the name of the book in the top here and it tells you if it's a sample the author and there's a little flap there that denotes whether you have it bookmarked and I have this page bookmarked down here we have a location tracker this is how you know if you're halfway through the book or you know almost done down here we have a wireless meter but it says off because I have it turned off to save battery life the left of that is a battery meter and to the right of that is menu now there's a lot that Kindle does that a standard book can't do for example you can change the text size and I do that by pressing this text chooser button down here and then I get a pop-up and then I use this selector to say I want to go to the number three and let's see what that does the screen refreshes and it's much bigger okay good something else you can do with the Kindle that you can't do with a standard book is look up a word on the fly well I mean if you have a book you got to get the dictionary find the letter P for a certain word and you know look down the page there's PRP you know and it takes a long time at least it takes me a long time on this let's find a word that we want to look up doo doo doo how about inflatable there's inflatable I know what that means but perhaps someone out there doesn't so I'm gonna click on inflatable I'm gonna actually click on the line and what it does is it gives up brings up a context menu I'm gonna choose look up and it will show me the definitions of the words on that line and it takes a moment but here we get put 25 foot and it's page 1 of 2 so I can go to the next page and on the next page will be inflatable there it is and if you want more details about the word inflatable you can select the word and it takes you into a screen that shows you pronunciation and sometimes it shows you the origin of the word as well which is really helpful and when you're done with that you click on the back button so reading what the kindle is an enjoyable experience I like to keep the text size on the smallest so I can see the most amount of text on the screen at one time the time that it takes to turn the page is about one and a half seconds and if you kind of compare that to a book if you're reading along it's about it's about one and a half seconds - so it's comparable in that in that sense I really like the reading experience it's comfortable on the eyes my eyes don't get tired I can get into the book into the author's world as I can with a paper book so just because it's an electronic device doesn't mean that you know it feels like I'm reading off of a computer because it doesn't that's it