Gadgetory

hey guys John rende you're here I'm gonna give you a walkthrough of the software on the Amazon Kindle - hope you enjoy alright guys so here is the Kindle powered off I'll go ahead and turn it on slide the switch on top takes a second and it blinks a few times and lights up so what you're greeted with when you turn the Kindle on is what's called the Kindle home screen this lists all of your content that you have here and you can navigate by that little black bar that follows it you can see right there I'm reading too fat to fish Kindle 2 users guide come standard on it the Oxford Dictionary and the archived items and something you want to read and say I want to read the Kindle 2 user's guide I just use this little joystick down here push it in glows and opens right up and I'll open right up to where you last work which is actually a very cool thing so you can be reading a book close it go and open a magazine come back to your book you'd be right on the same page you are in addition to right where you were on your magazine extra members right where you're at which is a very nice feature so let's go back to the home screen let me show you what your options are here in the home screen there's a lot of stuff that you can do with the Kindle and if those of you that are watching this for the first time don't know what the Kindle is let me preface this software tour by saying it's an e-book reader it's another way to read books magazines blogs and such on any other device so let me go ahead and show you this so we'll go ahead and hit the menu button and this gives you a full list of menus right here is where you turn your wireless off on Kindle one there was a switch for that but now it's right here you've got shop and Kindle Store that I'll show you in a moment search you can actually search for any content that you have on your Kindle words or topics settings not much in the way of settings really just change your email address registration of the Kindle and that's about it experimental experimental is actually where some of the cool stuff is let me show you then first you've got a basic web browser play mp3s text-to-speech so this does have Sprint's EVDO 3G connectivity here that's how it downloads books again which I'll show you in a moment so this takes advantage of that by using the web so you can view the web here so I'd open it up and opens up a pretty basic browser here's some sites that are already formatted for Kindle open Wikipedia I'll show you guys what that looks like real quickly so it's actually a very quick load it's a very useable browser if you're in a pinch and you've got your URL bar right up there you can type in whatever you'd like using the on-screen keyboard on the Kindle and there you go you've got Wikipedia right at your fingertips so that's the browser and it does have a very rudimentary mp3 player on here I don't have any mp3s but if I did it would play so you can enter URL go to top you can set bookmarks and there are some general settings here for the browser but I'm going to ahead and gloss over those so I can get to the other good stuff about making this a 30 minute long video so we'll go ahead and back to home screen so one of the big things that the Kindle has the ability to wirelessly download all of your content so you never actually ever have to connect this to a computer you're not tethered to a computer to get your content you down on everything right here on the Kindle so let me show you what that looks like we'll go ahead hit menu we'll go shop in Kindle Store connect to the network and it pulls up a full list of Kindle options this is kind of the store home spring here it recommends some books for you based off of other stuff you've purchased you can navigate by books newspapers magazines blogs national bestsellers kindle top sellers news and noteworthy books let's go to Kindle top sellers here and all the books I've searched for I haven't found one book that's not in Kindle format so something to keep in mind that really everything you want will be here so the first book that's in Kindle top sellers the book called assassin's apprentice let's say I want to download assassin's apprentice so I'll go ahead and hit the middle button of the five wage or sticker right there loads up and here your greed with a description of the book the option to buy it custom reviews you can kind of scroll down and keep reading all different custom reviews which is actually very handy you can see more and it'll load up more reviews and you can really get a sense of what people thought of the book so let's go back to royal assassins one other really nice saying that the Kindle has is ability to try a sample think of it like iTunes when you go to the iTunes Store you can play 30 seconds of a movie this will give you the first chapter of a book so you really get this chance of whether you like it or not so let me go ahead and download a sample and you can see how quickly these one chapter downloads and compare that to a full book try a sample and you buy everything here using Amazon one clip you set that up online and you are good so right now it's we're sending you a free sample automatically appear in your home screen so I'll go to home we'll see how long it takes for it to show up it actually is very quick I downloaded a full book in just under 60 seconds they definitely keep that in mind you're probably looking at anywhere from a minute to a minute and a half or a full book depending on your network connection and there it is royal assassins it's a sample right next to it so I'll open that up and there's the book so as long as we're in here on text let me go ahead and give you guys a software overview of what your options are when you're reading a book so this is a grayscale screen it's actually I believe 16 shades of grey and the reason it's gray and not backlit is to make it easier on the eyes just like reading a regular book so here I've got an example here's a brief history of time by a Stephen Hawking so you look at this here it's just standard text black and white and it's very similar to the way things look on the Kindle so that that's at least the rationale behind that so when you're here depending on your age your eyesight you can't throw option to set the font whatever you choose so right down at the bottom there is a font aa button you go ahead and click that move this back up and if you do with a whole bunch of different font sizes here you can kind of pick what you like the best to go all the way up to the biggest you can see how big that gets and different sizes in between I found the middle font to be quite good for me now you also notice right below there it says text-to-speech Kindle also has a built-in text-to-speech meaning it'll read the book - you don't expect any sort of audiobook functionality it's not gonna sound like an author's eloquent voice as you'll hear in a minute it's very robotic and you can choose the speech rate whether it's slower the default or faster you can choose whether it's a male or female let me show you guys what this sounds like should I turn that on the menu and I will start text-to-speech so you get a sense of the Texas speech sound like it sounds really robotic and definitely qualifies and this is an experimental feature I don't think I would ever use it even if I was in a car but that it does st. usable to you you can use the external speakers on the back of the device or you can plug in a headphone using the three point five millimeter headset jack so when you want to turn a page you got two options you can either hit the next button on the left next button on the right and when you hit that you'll see a flash and the page appears now one of the cool things about the Kindle is the batteries only being used when it's changing what's on the screen so right now it is not using a single set of battery to display the content obviously it's using some to connect to the 3G radio but if you turn the radio off and you're just reading a page you're not using any battery life meaning battery life on this device is fantastic I've been reading pretty much straight since I got it on Monday as you guys can see I still almost have full battery life which is really impressive and that's even keeping the 3G radio on just definitely something to keep in mind as you guys start to use the device so I'll go ahead and go back to the home screen and that's about it guys just a real quick software overview of the Kindle and how it works I'd really enjoyed using it it's been very easy on the eyes so far I'm gonna save the rest of those comments for a full review coming up and stay tuned for a few videos on Kindle tips and tricks and the final review video now one thing I did want to bring up is that there is a Kindle software for the iPhone and the iPod touch and people have been asking me of getting a lot of questions why did I get a Kindle when I can just read a book on the iPhone so let me tell you guys something in here I cannot read that much on the iPhone it hurts my eyes after a while it's great for reading an email or reading a blog but it comes time to reading a full book it really is a strain on the eyes so it's a nice compliments that Kindle it's certainly not a replacement for it in my mind and even screen size alone is quite different you know and the screen size cuts off right there and there's a lot more room and this really looks like a native page this has some glare and reflectiveness that does I'm gonna hurt my eyes at least anyway guys hope you enjoyed this software overview of the Kindle 2 for exclusive content follow me on Twitter twitter.com slash John for Lakers I will see you guys in the next video bye bye