Kindle for Android
The latest member of the Cloud Collections team and arguably the best so far:
- you can add Books or Docs to Collections (no Newsstand items)
- when viewing item lists long tap brings up options much like Paperwhite does, including Add to collection, Go to last page read/beginning/location, Shelfari book extras (wish they would add this to Fire), Remove/Download. You can create a new collection and change Collection membership as with iOS and Fire
- Collections list is just a list of Collection thumbnails in Name order. No option for Recent order as on iOS.
- opening the Collection, you can choose either List or Grid view. Moreover you can select sort order of Custom (manual sort), Recent, Title, Author A-Z or Author Z-A (I am not sure who would use Z-A but it is there). You can modify the Custom order manually just as on iOS, by tapping on the ‘edit’ icon and then dragging things into the order you want them in. I assume this syncs with iOS.
- after opening a book from Collections view, the ‘<Kindle’ icon returns to a view of the Collection you opened it from.
Critique:- this is more or less a superset of Cloud Collection features
- it is good that there is a List view inside each collection
- it is good to have both Custom and automatic sorting for each collection
- I like it that returning to Library from reading mode returns you to the view it was opened from. So if you were in On Device view you go back there (as usual) but when opening from a Collection view it takes you back to that view rather than to the Collections list, where you have lost context of which collection you were in and what book you were just reading.
- I'd like to be able to sort the collections list by Recent as on iOS
Next up: the Kindle Paperwhite 2 with the Dreaded Update