Quote:
Originally Posted by Nate the great
I'm fairly certain that's not true. The Kindle* uses Mobipocket's Java 1.0 code base (so does the Cybook, Iliad). For all intents and purposes it is a Mobipocket device.
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Hi, Nate.
"For all intents and purposes" can be interpreted pretty broadly. The app that Amazon released for the iPhone has several important differences from the Mobipocket app:
1) You can't read DRM'ed MOBI content (non-AZW, I mean) on it.
2) You can't read
non-DRM'ed MOBI content on it (without jailbreaking).
3) There's no desktop component for reading outside of the iPhone/iPod Touch.
Yes, it lets you read AZW files on the iPhone, which is the MOBI format (with a tweak or two). And yes, it shares code with Mobipocket (otherwise it wouldn't be able to read the AZW format), but for all
practical purposes, thet two apps are about as alike as Microsoft Word and OpenOffice.
Mobipocket is rumored to have been working on (or even sitting on) a version of the reader for the iPhone. The Kindle iPhone app isn't it.
The iPhone can't run Java unless it's jailbroken, so the Kindle app isn't using Java, either. (You don't need to jailbreak your iPhone to use the Kindle app.) They may be using equivalent code, but that's not the same thing. Going from Java to Objective C requires some reworking.
If Amazon had wanted to actually release Mobipocket for the iPhone, they could've done that much more quickly than they released the Kindle app.
The proof that the Kindle app isn't the Mobipocket client for the iPhone is that Amazon bought Lexcycle. There's no good reason for them to have done that, if not to get a good ereader for the iPhone (that they couldn't achieve with what they had). Stanza is a much more mature, feature-rich product, that can work (on a desktop level) places where Mobipocket can't.
As for the Kindle app, I think the current version is a stop-gap measure until they can get Stanza up and running the way they want it. After that, they switch over the Kindle app to Stanza.