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Originally Posted by ScalyFreak
My employer hands out service awards if you stick with them for 5 years or longer, and my 5-year anniversary is this month. Among the gadgets they award us (and among the very few I am interested in) are a free Kindle Touch or a free Kindle Keyboard. Since I use the Kindle app on my TouchPad practically daily for their free stuff, I figured, why not just get a Kindle and read on eInk instead of back-lit eye-straining painfulness? I have a Sony for my beloved indie stores, it makes perfect sense to have a Kindle for their store, for the same reason it made sense to me to get both an Xbox 360 and a PS3.
I have checked out a comparison table that lists their features side by side, and so far the Touch seems like a winner. There are a few things I was hoping I can get help clarifying though:
1. The comparison table claims the Touch has "limited kindle apps", while the Keyboard model has "all kindle apps". I have no idea what this means. What's the limitation?
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Most of the previously existing apps have been updated to work on Touch. And they work much much better with a touch interface. Don't worry about the other apps, you won't miss them.
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2. The comparison specifically says Touch has no ePub support. Nothing is said about the Keyboard. Does this mean the Keyboard has ePub support?
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Keyboard has no ePub support, except via a hack (Duokan). But ePub converts very well to KF8 format (using kindlegen or calibre), which Touch supports. Keyboard does not support KF8 so you have to convert to mobi and potentially lose some formatting.
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3. Can I do library lending over wifi to either model? If one of them can't do that, that's an instant deal breaker.
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It works on both, but it is a little painful. On Keyboard, I think you need to turn off Javascript. Just use a computer browser and save yourself frustration.
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4. Does the Touch have an on-screen keyboard, for searches and note taking?
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Yes, and it supports western European diacritic characters directly (tap and hold to see alternates). You need to hack Keyboard to add such functionality, and it is really not very pleasant by comparison.
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5. How are the dictionaries on the respective models? How is foreign language support?
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Both support Unicode mostly, Touch's support is broader. You can switch the UI to any of 7 languages (US English, UK English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese) and download dictionaries for each. Keyboard doesn't pay attention to language properties of the document so translating dictionaries are a pain (you can set only one dictionary as default). Touch seems to 'cascade' dictionaries so if you have several for one language it will check each until it finds the word. So if you have, say, a technical glossary you can in principle add that.
It seems neither supports dictionary look up for non-Latin alphabets, but Amazon will probably need to fix that if they want to launch in Japan/China/Russia.
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6. How is the Linux support?
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Not sure what you are looking for there. Touch is hackable and you can do a lot that way with standard Linux tools.
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Thanks in advance, everyone. The rest of the anniversary awards are lame and boring, but a free Kindle... how can I not be excited about that?
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I would add that Touch has some wonderful additional features, some of which are:
- Better PDF support, including PDF bookmarks and links, TTS.
- XRay (google it)
- translate via Bing
- much easier to highlight text and navigate hyperlinks
- NCX navigator (popup Table of Contents navigation) for most books
- 'report content error' (good for venting frustration with bad formatting)
Get 3G+Wifi if you can. Wifi setup can be a pain, and the web-enabled web features are nice to have all of the time.