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I Love My Amazon Kindle. And I Love It On My iPhone.

Written by Russ on March 4, 2009 – 11:53 am

When the first Amazon Kindle came out, I bought it.  I actually had to wait a month or so because demand was so high, but when I got it in January of 2008, I was really…

Underwhelmed.

I loved the damn thing, but it’s industrial design was… meh. The edges where too harsh.  It was bulky.  The big-ass buttons were too big ass.  Pages turned when I would rest the Kindle against my bag on the train and I’d lose my place.

It annoyed me.

But I loved feeding my reading habit and buying books on the train and just buying books to show off.  Plus, it was pretty cool to have the Wall Street Journal ready for me every day when I was ready for it.

Except, of course, that Wall Street Journal would not allow me to have web access to the paper unless I paid for that online access, as well.

I sold that Kindle a few weeks back, even though I loved it so.  To be honest, since I’ve been working on the book, my reading habit has dwindled severely.  Now I have a whole bunch of these presentation things I need to be working on (and I am), but I also have some spare time to get back into reading, so I was pretty happy to jump to the front of the line and place an order for a new Kindle as a first generation owner.

I got it last week, and the improvements are unreal.

Okay, they’re real. But they’re (almost) all the right ones!

No longer do you have to push a funky key combination to force the sleep mode. Instead, you flip the switch at the top–easy!  The buttons are smaller, and require a bit more impact and force (ie actual desire) to push, meaning you have substantially fewer accidental page turns!  This, naturally, makes me happy.

The pages, well, they turn quicker.  That makes me happy, too, except for the slight adjustment I’ve “learned” from when I push the page turn to when it turns… Ooops!  There’s that nifty little “read the words to me” feature, but it’s more to show it off than anything else.

I love that I can email my Kindle account PDFs or Documents and they’ll convert it for a dime and then I can read it at my leisure.  It’s annoying that it doesn’t keep images intact (I sent a PDF of The Book to it), but it’s nice to be able to read work, etc. documents NOT on the iPhone only.

In general, however, the industrial design rocks, the overall experience is greatly improved, the keyboard is better and the entire device just makes a lot more sense and seems about as right as it can be for an eReader, or whatever we’re calling them now.

The downsides that I currently see are:

No SD card for expansion of memory–but I never filled the last SD card, and Amazon will let you keep your digital books on their network, with the availability to pull them down whenever you want.  Not much of an issue from where I sit.

I still can’t print or grab snippets of text, send it somewhere and print it.  It’s minor, but it’s a pain in the butt to not be able to snag text, and article, etc. and print it off for reference.

This version did not come with a case like the previous version–I wasn’t a huge fan of the last case, but at least I had one and I didn’t pay extra for it.  In return, the package was a lot less, so I guess there’s some tiny bit of the environment that got saved, but I still had to shell out a bunch of bucks to get a neoprene case, which in turn required more packaging and shipping, so I think that ecological argument just got tossed right out the window into the smoggy air.  Just saying.

And it just got better…

Today, the Kindle iPhone application just came out, officially making Kindle hardware AND software, I think.  The application is free, and like all the other iPhone applications: select it, install it, use it.

I found all of my books in a place called “Archives”. I grabbed the most recent book I’ve been reading and it downloaded it to my iPhone.  In another tap, the book opened for me to read…

And this is where it got REALLY cool…

It opened up to the last page I read on my Kindle the day before.

No kidding!

While sitting in a doctor’s office this morning, I was flipping through pages–it was a thumb swipe from right-to-left–and I was able to exit the application and re-open to the same place.  A “refresh”-like looking button is on the screen, so I tapped it and in a few moments it let me know that I was at the furthest-most read page on any of my devices.

Pretty freaking cool, really.

Even cooler…

I didn’t have to “register a device” or make any limited number of devices “authorized” to use it, which is a hard lesson that our pals at Apple should start to learn–especially for those of us with iPods, iPhones, AppleTVs and more than one computer.

Kindle: I’m a fan. Thanks for listening and improving.  I hope the next changes are software changes so I don’t have to go through the sell-and-upgrade process again in a year.


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Unboxing the Roku Netflix Box – And Using It, Too

Written by Russ on June 5, 2008 – 11:29 pm

The Roku Netflix box arrived at my doorstep today, and FedEx’s handy email updates of the tracking status made it very difficult to make it through the rest of my meetings before commuting home. When I did finally arrive home, the tiny little box was sitting next to the substantially larger box of a Wii Fit, that somehow managed not to help me begin a new workout regime tonight.

The Roku Netflix box is simple. It’s easy to set-up if you know how to, well, set things up. I’ve got a receiver that supports 2 additional zones in my house, and I run everything through it–the HD DVD, the SqueezeBox, the XM Stereo, the Cable TV and any random kids toy that we connect to the front of the receiver.

Picture-taking aside, it took me less than 2 minutes to get everything connected and ready to use. Your mileage may vary; I have 2 Cat6 connections behind my TV which made it easy to borrow from existing appliances to get this up and running.

To start, the Roku Netflix box has a small footprint. I have a SqueezeBox 3 and it is slightly larger than half the width of that, but shares similar dimensions of height and depth. The remote is incredibly simple–and the packaging came with the batteries needed to operate it. Call me crazy, but that’s one of my favorite “little” things companies can do and let’s me quickly get to the task of setting up the new toy

The Roku Netflix box offers you many different options for connecting to your television. There are Composite, HDMI, S-Video and even Optical Audio in addition to the Component connections–which is what I used since the cables were handy I just wanted to see this thing in action.

When I connected the Roku Netflix box to my receiver, the power supply and the Cat6 connection, I noticed something:

On the box, component connections were: yellow, red, white.
On the receiver, component connections: yellow, white, red.

Who’s right, who’s wrong? Why aren’t they the same? Just curious.

Keep in mind that this box does not currently support High Definition, but it has been mentioned that the ability to do so could be given via a software update.

The next thing I noticed was that there is NO POWER BUTTON.

Got that? The only way to turn this device off, as far as I can tell–and I did go through the user guide–is to unplug. That makes me a little nervous from a bandwidth perspective, but I assume that when the screensaver kicks in the device sort of sleeps and there are no worries. But still, I worry a little.

Now that everything was connected and powered up, I went through a pretty quick-and-easy couple of set-up screens. What was most odd was that, after I chose my connection type, the box went for a software update, updated itself, restarted and then re-asked me what my connection type was again.

I’m not sure I understand why settings were apparently reset/not retained, but the steps were simple enough that it’s probably a non-issue.

All of the rest of the connection verification steps were taken care of again and the box recognized that it was not registered as of yet and provided me with a code that was good for 30 minutes on the Netflix website. I assume that after 30 minutes I’d need to restart/refresh or it would do so for me.

Naturally, I went to the appropriate URL and registered the box.

The Roku Netflix box informed me it was all registered-up and ready to go and after a few moments of lading, it started displaying a carousel view of my Watch Instantly queue. Initially, the covers of the selections were blank, but in about a half minute the imagery started displaying.

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