At 07:42 PM 3/6/2012, Winterlight wrote:
I am thinking about getting a cheap Kindle for reading books. At
first, I was thinking about getting a Kindle Fire but where I live I
can never find a hot spot. Very few business provide them, and even
that small number has declined over time. I think the Kindle Fire is a
great value but I would only be able to use it online in my house, and
from playing around with them at the local OfficeMax, I found the
cheaper monochrome Kindles easier to read for some reason. I found
Kindle screen amazingly good but something about a backlit display
doesn't lend it self to book reading... at least for me.
So I have a change of plan, and I am thinking about getting the 80
dollar Kindle 2. For 80 dollars you have to put up with an advertising
screen saver and RSS Feed. For 109 no advertising. Can anybody who
uses one tell me how annoying the advertising is.. or maybe it is
innocuous. Any feedback on this, or Kindle use in general would be
appreciated.
Hi Winterlight
I have bought two regular (approx. monochrome 7" screen) Kindles and
two DX Kindles (approx. 10" screens).
I never used the Kindle WiFi (7") because I'm almost never at a hot
spot, and I don't use wireless at home anymore. As a matter of fact, I
gave the WiFi Kindle away as a gift after a few weeks.
The other 7" is a "3G" Kindle. (It works with either WiFi or 3G phone
connection.) This was better, but I don't use it anymore. I find it's
screen to be too small for any technical books. Yes, it's convenient to
carry, but it's just too small for my use, even for novels.
So I use the two Kindle DX readers. Like the Kindle 3G, they download
books for free....as many times over as you want. (That is, you can
download a book that you bought from Amazon and then delete it from
your DX and then download it for free again, and then delete it again,
and download it for free again...and so on.) Cloud storage. But it
takes a lot of time to download some books...like five or ten minutes
each for a technical text book.
I got the second DX because I filled the memory of the first one. (I
keep a lot of technical books and papers on the DX and they take up
lots of room.) I think these DX only have 2 GB of memory, of which
about 800 MB is used by the system. (And the device becomes slow if you
get it below a few hundred MB of memory and totally non-responsive if
it gets down much below 100 MB.) So yes, you could store a couple of
thousand books on the DX...but only normal size novels which are mostly
smaller than half a MB apiece. Many math and physics books take up to
50 MB...which would limit me to about twenty such books. I have about
1200 kindle format books right now, and more than half are technical
books. And then I have maybe 8 GB of scientific papers in Adobe PDF
form that I would like to have available at any time. I can't store
half the books or more than a maybe hundred PDF files on either DX.
So I bought two 10" (or so) Android tablets which each have 32 GB of
on-board memory and SD card slots. And color screens! One accepts 128
GB full size SD memory cards, the other takes only micro SD cards but
up to 64 GB. Either of these have more than enough memory for my
reading material.
And then Amazon started publishing Kindle books that only work on
Windows PCs (i.e., desktops of laptops) using Amazon's free "Kindle for
PC" reader program. For example, some very important books (to me) will
only work on "Kindle for PC". Not on Kindle readers or on Android
tablets. (Some work on I
So right now, I would never buy another Kindle that didn't have a slot
for a memory card. (The first Kindle that came out had one, but those
are obsolete.) I've talked with Amazon Kindle tech support workers and
they say that Amazon has no plans to have card readers on any future
Kindles. (It's all in the cloud you know. Well, I don't like that.)
Also, what do I do if the on-board batteries on my Kindle DX die. (It's
been two years now.)
One thing I didn't mention is how long a Kindle or tablet or laptop
would last on a battery charge. That could be a factor. My Kindles hold
a charge for a long time (days?)...as long as I have their 3G wireless
connection turned off. But if the 3G is on, the batter runs down fast.
If I'm downloading lots of books, the battery charge might last only an
hour. So if you want to use the cloud to store your books, you better
be near an electric socket and be willing to bring along your charger.
Make what you will of my experience with Kindles. I love having books
in Kindle format, but mostly just for reading on a PC.
If you want to use a Kindle Fire for browsing the Internet, why not
just get a tablet?
Regards,
Bill
