I am totally bummed that the Kindle DX did not live up to my expectations. I wanted to love it, but instead am stuck at like it. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great device if you need the rotation and/or larger screen or really hate the lighter text of the Kindle 2; also, you no longer are forced to convert your .PDF files.
As a replacement for my Kindle 2–No Thanks; I also hoped that it would become my reference/white paper respository–another nope on that one as well..
If you’ve looked around on this site at all, you know that I’m no Kindle hater. I loved my Kindle 1, gave it up (reluctantly) to the big brown eyes of my daughter, and I take my Kindle 2 with me everywhere. So I was really looking forward to having a Kindle for work (DX) and another one for play (K2).
Lets start with the good:
- Text is clear and crisp with none (to my eye) of the reported contrast problems of the Kindle 2
- Screen size is wonderful, giving you the same reading experience you get with a hard cover book
- The buttons have a nice profile, making them easier (for me) to depress than the round shallow buttons on the Kindle 2
- Landscape mode is nice for widescreen documents
- The auto-rotate feature worked well for me once I got used to it.
Okay, now the bad.
- Loss of the number keys means no more easy entry of numbered book locations requiring two handed key presses needed for page numbers (pdfs) and locations. This is just stupid to me and I wonder if Amazon has a usability team for the Kindle or just testers to make sure that everything works properly. Hey Amazon, I would love to be on that team if you decide to put one together.
- The wideness of the device with the keyboard directly in the middle means that unless you have huge hands, you can ‘double-thumb’ the keyboard, the DX is too big. Maybe they should have split the keyboard down the middle and pushed each half of the QWERTY closer to the outside edges. Just a little would have worked.
- Keypad and note boxes are upside down when attempting to annotate while reading in ‘left-handed’ mode so you have to keep turning the device around to ‘text’
- Line spacing has been removed, no longer able to use ALT+SHIFT+ 1 thru 9 to change line spacing. Its replaced by, IMO, a useless ‘more’ or ‘less’ text option that just increases the side margins. Huh?
- Most of my technical reference books are rendered with way too small text and without any type of zoom, I can’t read them in comfort
- Opening and auto-rotate on larger pdfs is very slow. My initial examples were a 255 page game guide with mostly graphics, 83MB and 467 page software reference containing renderable text with some basic graphics 46MB. They both worked so slowly that I updated another dozen documents of all sizes including some credit card statements, spreadsheets that had been printed to PDF, etc. I can restate with some confidence that pdfs just load slowly unless they’re pretty small.
- Since Amazon only used a basic PDF engine, some of the features needed for professional/student use just ain’t there. I can give them the external document link limitations, but in-document links are pretty much essential for PDF navigation. Have they looked at their own DX User Guide?
- I’ve stated before and will continue to state that there needs to be some type of Kindle content management; anyone loading more that a couple of pages of content needs to be able to easily filter based on some sort of criteria. I’ll use myself as an example. If I have dozens of tech books, I need to be able to grab the ones on programming vs. applications or ones for a single class etc.
So, all in all, I like the DX, but its not going to work for me. It’s a little too much of a Gen 1 device. Some said that about the Kindle 1, but the DX seems much more rushed to market to me than the Kindle 1. I feel that the K1 lived up to more of its claims–comments on the design aside, it did what it was supposed to do with more elegance and ease of use.
What puts the DX into my Gen 1 device category is Amazon’s claims. I don’t think it is going to work for student (or professional) use and we still await the newspaper ‘deals’ touted in its press conference. Now if Amazon had just announced that they were coming out with a larger Kindle with a couple of additional features, that would have been a different story.
I look forward to seeing the next gen of the DX and really hope that Amazon listens to us folks that use our Kindles on a daily basis, not just the casual reviewers.
