Most user reviews of the new Kindle 3, especially those with photo spreads, have focused on the newly-available graphite model, but if you really want to see the differences in the hardware, screen quality, and web capabilities in the new model, it may be more useful to put the two white models head-to-head.
That’s just what Andrys Basten did at her blog A Kindle World. They might be the first user photos of the white Kindle 3 online (I haven’t been able to find any earlier ones).
Also, if you pay close attention, there are terrific user tips for Kindle 3 users embodied in these photos. I’ve been really impressed by the new WebKit browser, but found full-sized web sites harder to navigate than their mobile versions. When I saw Basten’s pictures, I said, “Oh, put the NYT in landscape, not portrait! That’s genius!”
There are a few dumb things the Kindle’s web browser can’t do. Clicking on a link that tries to force you to open a new window just gets you a “this web browser does not support multiple windows” message. You can easily edit titles of bookmarks but not URLs. Drop-down menus sometimes just fool the browser altogether.
And to get to the web browser at all, you’ve got to go to the “Experimental” section of the menu, then tinker around in there for a while. (Would you guess to change the orientation from portrait to landscape, you should click the font-size button? I wouldn’t.)
Amazon’s packed plenty of smart features into its web browser, but mostly failed to acknowledge them, Basten told Wired.com. “Amazon’s paying for the Kindle’s 3G access,” she says. They “will be conflicted about [heavy internet use], and it shows.”
But once you get the hang of these little tricks — use mobile URLs in portrait, full URLs in landscape, use the built-in article mode (just like Safari’s Reader/Readability/Instapaper) whenever you can, and start building up your own workarounds — the web browsing capability on the Kindle 3 is really tremendous. Newspapers, blogs, Twitter, Google Reader — it does them all well. It’s not just an e-book reader; it’s an honest-to-goodness reading machine.
All images courtesy of Andrys Basten and A Kindle World.
See Also:
- Amazon Strikes Back at the iPad With New, $140 Kindle
- The Best Gadget Is the One That Gets To Your House
- Why Does the New Kindle Have A Microphone?
- Safari 5’s ‘Reader’ Nudges Web Publishers to App Store
- Amazon Kindle 3 May Be On Its Way
- New, Improved Instapaper for Kindle
Full story at http://feeds.wired.com/~r/GearFactor/~3/lzfLreAJcws/
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