Geoff Arnold

I’ve been enjoying my new Kindle 2. Several people have asked for my opinion of it, and have wondered when I was going to post a review. Instead of rushing to press, I’ve been taking the time to appreciate the difference between the original and the new model; I wanted to finish a complete book before committing myself. I’m in the middle of Jenet Conant’s wonderful The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington; I started reading it on my original Kindle, a couple of days before the new one arrived. Exactly as advertised, when I opened up my Kindle 2 and selected “The Irregulars”, it opened up just where I’d left off. Very nice!

So for the last few days I’ve been enjoying my new Kindle as well as a delightful book. And then, a few minutes ago, I was scanning my blog feeds and came across a piece by Marc Hedlund on the new Kindle app for the iPhone. I knew that it was in the works, but I had no idea when it was being released. (Our internal “need to know” is pretty good at Amazon.) So I fired up iTunes, found the app, downloaded it, sync’d my iPhone, ran the app, signed in, and picked “The Irregulars” from the Archived items list. A few seconds later I was reading the book, exactly where I’d left off earlier today.

Page turning is achieved with the kind of sideways sweeping gesture that is completely familiar and natural on the iPhone. It’s fairly easy to do this one-handed, using either hand. The default font was a bit too large for my taste, making each “page” uncomfortably short, but switching to the smallest font resulted in a beautifully crisp display. Just out of curiosity, I logged in to the “Manage your Kindle” page on the Amazon website, and it showed Geoff Arnold’s iPhone as a managed device.

So now I have another kind of Kindle to review….

UPDATE: Glenn Fleishman has some interesting comments over at TidBITS.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009 at 11:08 pm and is filed under Amazon, Books, Gadgets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.