If anyone remembers, I mentioned this a few weeks ago. Well, I just had to get it, even though it is a bit pricy. My first take is "pretty good". The display is very legible in all normal lighting situations, including very bright light outside in the Texas summer. So far, I've only downloaded a single IBM PDF manual and loaded it onto the thing. I forgot to actually measure it, but I'd say that the Kindle display is maybe about 75% of a US letter sized paper. In portrait mode, the Kindle display an entire page at a time. I found the type to be a bit small, but such high resolution that it was still fairly easy to read, and I have severely near sighted. One major thing is that PDFs appear in the "Contents" with a title which is their file name. I am working on a small program to help me with this by creating Linux "symlinks" to the real PDF name, then copying the PDFs to the Kindle using the "symlink" name. Yes, the Kindle works with Linux. I plugged it in and my Fedora 11 system immediately automounted it at /media/Kindle. The main thing that is disappointing is that the PDF reader on the Kindle does not implement the "hyperlink" capability in the PDF the way that acroread does. That means that you can cannot select a entry in the PDF's "Table of Contents" (or elsewhere) and go directly to that page. The only way to skip around is to bring up the "go to page ..." dialog box and put in a new page number. And the pages are numbered starting at 1 for the first page and incrementing. I know that some PDFs have pages like "2-1" which Acroread can use. Not the Kindle, unfortunately.
I'm happy to have bought it, but a tad disappointed due to the navigation "problem" mentioned above. In the off chance that anybody was interested. John McKown Systems Engineer IV IT Administrative Services Group HealthMarkets(r) 9151 Boulevard 26 * N. Richland Hills * TX 76010 (817) 255-3225 phone * (817)-961-6183 cell [email protected] * www.HealthMarkets.com Confidentiality Notice: This e-mail message may contain confidential or proprietary information. If you are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender by reply e-mail and destroy all copies of the original message. HealthMarkets(r) is the brand name for products underwritten and issued by the insurance subsidiaries of HealthMarkets, Inc. -The Chesapeake Life Insurance Company(r), Mid-West National Life Insurance Company of TennesseeSM and The MEGA Life and Health Insurance Company.SM ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
