My Japanese Paperwhite just got delivered today!

[xendula]

Originally Posted by Snorkledorf

Well, you asked! Here comes an educational, if post!

There was an episode of "Project X," a TV show that documents small developments that made a big difference in people's lives, that showed the people in 1978 who made the conceptual jump from the typewriter model (select from all available characters) to the phonetic-conversion model (develop software to do the work of suggesting likely candidates from the user's phonetic input). That totally changed everything.

Up until that light bulb came on, most everything was hand-written just because Japanese typewriters were so impossibly clumsy to use, not to mention expensive, that people were like, "Screw this, give me a pen!"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFFl6AMUF-4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHJhah1c-K0

It then took years to gradually filter through the business world as computers got cheaper. So unlike the western business world where there was a generation or two of typewriters between old handwriting and modern computer use, Japanese business worked on handwritten documents right through the 1980s, before computers finally took over.

As a side note, this is one reason that fax machines are still in common use even today; they established a serious foothold during that decade.

STILL :
Hmm, totally makes sense! So do Japanese firstgraders learn Western script along with Kana and Kanji? Do really old people know Romaji as well?

[Snorkledorf]

Oh, sure, Roman characters have been part of elementary school education in Japan since at least the 1950s.

They even moved it up a year in 2010 from 4th to 3rd grade, specifically to make it easier for kids to use computers and mobile devices and such.

[xendula]

Very enlightning thread - thanks for the into

[ghudod]

See also https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho....php?p=2392375

Price $90... but what about shipping...

[yiming]

@Snorkledorf how did you do a screen capture when the keyboard is on? I've tried, but the keyboard would disappear as soon as I pressed the Home key. Thanks.

[Snorkledorf]

Home key? We don't need no stinkin' Home key!

Since the Paperwhite is lacking handy things like...er...buttons of any sort, they set it up so you have to simultaneously tap the upper-right and lower-left corners of the screen to take a screenshot, so that's what I did.

Getting the screenshot to take before it dismissed the expanded conversions panel was tough, but having the regular keyboard displayed was no problem.

BTW, I've now got the Paperwhite jailbreak, screen saver hack, easy-peasy font "hack," and the Collections Manager hack-oid running on this device, so it looks to be perfectly compatible with non-Japanese customizations too. It really appears to just be exactly the same machine; this is so rare in Japan that I'm still befuddled by it.

[Corran006]

Assuming I don't get a crap version with lighting problems, is this really worth it to upgrade from a kindle 3 aka kindle keyboard?

Just wondering..

thanks

[Snorkledorf]

Here are a few thoughts. Probably not comprehensive.

Cons:

• I don't like losing the physical buttons:
  • Lack of page-turn buttons means I have to take off my gloves on cold train platforms just to swipe the screen.
  • Back, Menu, and Home now take 2 taps each (the first one to display the options bar on screen) instead of 1 button.
  
• I sorely miss the ability to use the 5-way controller to jump between sections by clicking it left and right. That functionality is just gone on the PW.
• I also mourn the loss of the progress bar. The percentage display and "37 min left in this book" in no way make up for that loss.
• The lack of text-to-speech is highly inconvenient.
• I strongly dislike that the memory is so much smaller than the KK (feels like we're traveling back in time or something ). Now I actually have to think about which books to put onboard, rather than just loading every book I've ever found.
• The battery doesn't last as long.

Pros:

• The backlight is very nice!
  • Doesn't tire my eyes out at all after a while the way an LCD screen does.
  • In the right lighting conditions it can fake my eyes out and just look like a bright-background display instead of the reality of a medium-bright-background display being lit up.
• The touch screen is great for highlighting text, way better than the 4-way.
• It's also good for browsing the Kindle store.
• I love how it turns on automatically when you open the Amazon cover.
• Cover view! Yay!
• I like that it comes with 6 fonts for Roman languages, rather than just "Regular," "Condensed," and "Sans-serif"
• It's also easy to tweak it to add custom fonts without even needing to jailbreak it.
• It's multilingual right out of the box.
• I've long wanted the ability to set the full-page reset-flash to "only every so often" rather than "every $*@#= page."

[xendula]

Another Pro for me:
Time to read: shows in the left hand bottom corner, and by touching it, you can change between seeing %left in book, time left in chapter, time left in book.
It's the most useful feature that I would no longer want to miss!!