But as soon as they add touchscreen and WiFi to the larger screen, I’ll be sorely tempted to upgrade. In a way, I’m glad that Amazon didn’t release a Kindle DX Touch, because then I really would have regretted buying the DX when I did. Even before the Kindle Touch was announced, comparing the DX to my smartphone, I had already come to the conclusion that this device is begging for a touch screen. The navigation buttons are serviceable, but clunky, and I often find myself confusing the Back button and the Previous Page button. Even using it to type in a 2 or 3 digit number-which you have to do to navigate to a particular page-is painful, as it requires hitting the shift key once for each digit in the page number that you want to enter.
The main new feature that I really miss is the touchscreen. The keyboard is horrific for anything longer than a couple of words. With 3G turned off (which is how I leave it pretty much all the time), my DX gets about a month between between battery charges, and the smaller Kindles are supposed to be good for two months. Regarding battery life, the Kindle Fire is supposed to be good for 8 hours of continuous reading. Reading on the black & white DX, I can read for a long time without the eye strain that I get when reading on a computer screen. But of course the color e-readers, including the new Kindle Fire, don’t use E Ink, which was important to me both for readability and for battery life. Color would be a nice feature to have, and if it were important enough, I could have gone with the Barnes & Noble NOOK Color. But the DX was not available with WiFi, and there are still no noises about whether this will happen. 3G would be great if you want to buy a new book at the beach, but my main need is transferring files that are already on my computer. WiFi would have been a nice feature to have.
But not knowing how well PDFs would convert to the Amazon e-reader format (read further for notes on PDF conversion), I picked the larger-screen Kindle DX for full-page PDF viewing. Obviously, as with laptops, there’s a portability/usability tradeoff. When I got it last May, Amazon had not yet released the Kindle Touch or the Kindle Fire, so my choice was basically between the 6” screen (now renamed Kindle Keyboard) with WiFi (and optionally with 3G wireless) and the 9.7” Kindle DX with 3G wireless only. So when my parents asked me what I wanted as a graduation gift… Which Kindle? There’s the obvious environmental concern, which I partially mitigate by printing everything 4-up double-sided (usually prompting onlookers to ask “Can you read that?!!”), but even then there’s the problem of actually having the articles with you when you find yourself with downtime on the subway, at the doctor’s office, etc. But printing the articles is problematic, too. Many of you will know what I mean when I say that I can’t stand reading on a computer monitor. I was never particularly interested in reading novels on the Kindle, but as an academic I have reams of journal articles-most in PDF format-that I need to read and consult for my research.
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