Sunset Lake Software - Comments for "Kindle DX: An e-reader for scientists and engineers"

Thanks a lot. I was thinking

Thanks a lot. I was thinking of buying a kindle 3G (not dx) for additionally helping me with scientific pdfs. Is 3G okay for reading scientific pdfs? Readability?

Thanks for the review. I was

Thanks for the review. I was thinking of getting the Kindle DX to download medical articles but was worried about the screen size / resolution vs paper. Seems (by your images) that it is pretty good. Even tables and diagrams. Have you had the chance to compare this to the iPad? The e-Ink seems to be less straining on the eyes and I would think reading on the iPad would be tiring after awhile.

That would be this case. Yes,

That would be this case.

Yes, I am an engineer, and it does show sometimes. I may need to provide a follow-on article to this one, however, because my iPad has now replaced the Kindle DX as my primary reading device.

Can U please provide the link

Can U please provide the link for the leather case ?

I cannot find this one on amazon website.

Thanks a lot.

PS: One of the best Kindle DX reviews. I suppose U are an engineer. :)

wow so the dx still has

wow so the dx still has issues with pdf?

By the way, I rebelled

By the way, I rebelled against the lack of study tools for the PDFs and then got my DX anyway on the 28th of June. I've not seen anything I could do with the the PDFs though I tried. A tech support fellow told me on May 18 that he was able to make a note for a PAGE but not for a subsection of a page. However, Amazon made a statement, in response to my request for solid information, that no notes were makeable and we'd need to convert the PDF to do that, and when I checked in late June, when I got my DX, there was no way I could do it.

Did you get your DX in early June ? The official word from Amazon in May was that notes would not be implemented in PDFs. I have an entry on this dilemma at http://kindleworld.blogspot.com/2009/05/kindle-dx-pdfs-might-accept-adde...

Interesting.

- Andrys

Brad, to make tags ot labels,

Brad, to make tags ot labels, I use the Notes feature, but that's not available with the PDF, alas. However, it works really well with regular books. Maybe you were using the Notes feature? Some of us make "tags" or labels for genres (with a lead note in each book) with words like xhistory, xfiction xbio and any other categories we'd want to search.

A note can be put on any page and made a label for that page. Maybe that's it ?

- Andrys

Honestly, I can't seem to

Honestly, I can't seem to find that option now. I recall making bookmarks with labels in PDFs, but I can't seem to find any of them. I wonder if one of the firmware updates they've pushed changed something there.

Brad, Thanks for an

Brad,
Thanks for an uncommonly helpful review.

When the screen contrast seems less ideal than usual, try pressing alt-G combo two or three times. I've found that helps.
(And for numbers, the alt key doesn't have to be pressed at the same time but can precede the number.)

An Amazon rep is seen in a youtube videoclip telling a partner school for the upcoming learning-mode study, that students can just sit where they are and access google or wikipedia and that it's free and 'on us' and Jeff Bezos told a Wired Magazine conference in mid June that the wireless costs are built into the unit and that to make the unit cheaper he'd have to charge about $60/mo. (the going rate) for unlimited net access we have. So they are not in a position to start charging for non-store web access until this school semester is over next June.

Yes, when not getting EVDO, the unit will scale down to something like RX1 where possible, which is slower -- and efforts to connect in that situation can drain the battery more.

I've a question for you: What have you meant when you say you can give a title to your bookmarks? I can't find that. Would love to know how.

One tip: When reading a normal book, you can highlight a name by pressing down to start the highlighting at the beginning of the name/word and then 5-way to the right until you've got the entire name and then INSTEAD of ending the highlight by clicking there, press the spacebar.

You'll see the word pasted in the search bar and then you can just press the Enter key (below the DEL key), since 'find' -- to search the book -- is the default option

This is useful for a long name. Or for finding previous references to a character named. It can of course be done for a full name or for any word or phrase you want and also, as you've noted, you can then 5-way to the right to google or explore wikipedia for the highlighted word or phrase.

Thanks again. I'll come back to look for your guidance on how to title a bookmark when on a PDF.

- Andrys
http://kindleworld.blogspot.com

Sadly, this seems unlikely -

Sadly, this seems unlikely - people have complained about this since the Kindle 1. I own an Iliad (the 8 inch version) and I just got a DX, and I'm torn about which I like best (or rather, which set of limitations annoys me least). The Iliad has battery life much closer to a laptop than the DX since its hardware is not designed to sleep immediately like the Kindle and the Sony Reader. Startup time is also more like a laptop, around 2 mins, which is surprisingly annoying. However the organisation is great and the PDF reader is considerably better than the DX's. You can zoom to your heart's content and set it in continuous page mode. You can arrange everything in folders as you would expect, and in the documents themselves internal links work and you can get at the table of contents. The Kindle is almost unusable for a PDF of a book, for example, since you can only jump to a particular page number and the keyboard is kind of fiddly. The other thing that drives me crazy is the fact that the Kindle automatically crops borders, which means that pages change size and move around (the last half page of a chapter is presented in the middle of the screen, for example). Not being able to turn this off, combined with the lack of folders, is inexcusable in a $500 device IMO. And finally, the documents that were difficult to read on the Iliad because of the screen size are not much better on the Kindle - they're normally technical papers with 2 dense columns (a lot of SIGGRAPH papers, for example) and since the aspect ratio is different on the Kindle (taller & skinnier) these aren't really improved at all.

I actually do love both devices, but they both frustrate me because they could both have been so much better with what seems like relatively little effort. The perfect reader still doesn't exist, sadly.