[jharker]

Hey, everyone! I've finally got a few minutes, so I'll try to give my impressions of the Kindle DX. I got to hold one for a few minutes at the press conference today, so I have had some actual hands-on time.

First, let me summarize my remarks by saying that this is the first e-reader I've seen that I would replace my iLiad with. Now, the iRex iLiad has many good points, and the iRex DR's screen is still a tad bigger than the Kindle DX, but any comparison just stops right there.

The Kindle has built-in cellular wireless, a MUCH longer battery life, great UI, more format support, and now with the DX, a large screen. And it's $370 cheaper. The iRex DR has... umm... a stylus.

Up until this point iRex had the lead in hardware, which somewhat compensated for their really poor software/UI design. Now Amazon has matched if not exceeded iRex in the hardware department, and with a much slicker UI and more software features to boot. The gauntlet has been thrown down. The next 12 months should be VERY interesting in the ereader market.

Okay, enough editorializing. Let's have some details.

In terms of the basics, the DX is supposedly comparable to the Kindle 2: same screen material (2nd-gen e-ink), same screen refresh rate, similar battery life, Whispernet cellular wireless functionality.

Physically, the DX is nice to handle. It's fairly heavy, a little heavier than I found comfortable. The press material says it's 18.9 oz., or just a bit over one pound. Probably not something you want to hold up with one (or two) hands for a long time. The screen is apparently glass-based, not plastic based (as some have inquired), but the thing feels so solid and stable that I wouldn't worry much about breaking it, as long as you're reasonably careful. I would definitely buy a cover, though.

The screen itself is 150 dpi, 9.7" diagonal, which translates to 8" by 5.5", almost exactly half of a standard letter-sized page. This means that pdfs can display at 100% zoom in landscape mode, and most are very readable even in portrait mode. I was not able to see it used with any two-column academic journal articles, unfortunately. But my impression is that they would be just as easy to read.

To compensate for the large screen, Amazon also added a "words per line" option to the config menu. In reflowable texts, this essentially allows you to set the column width to be narrower than the screen width. Personally, I would love to see a "two column" option as well, but it didn't appear to be there.

Speaking of pdfs, the DX has native pdf support, as I'm sure you know by now. This appears to be seamless, and the user interface is exactly the same as for any other document. I don't know about annotation or note taking support for pdfs; I know that's been a popular question.

Another big new feature is auto-rotate. The DX has a built-in accelerometer. If you rotate it 90-degrees, after a short pause the page flickers and reorients itself. All re-zooming or text reflowing is handled automatically. Any of the four orientations work for this: 0, 90, 180, 270. The auto-rotate also works seamlessly with any kind of document: pdf, newspapers, textbooks, even the web browser. Finally, there is an option in the config menu to lock the orientation to any angle, so you can lay it flat and not have it constantly flipping on you.

Speaking of the web browser: according to the Amazon spokesman, web browsing on the DX is still free and you can still visit any site with it.

In the documents I saw, both textbooks and the newspapers were in reflowable file formats, not pdf. Presumably (since Amazon has agreements with textbook and newspaper publishers) this would be the norm. There are several ways to browse a newspaper: by section, by summary (headline & lede), or page by page.

Let's see, what else. The keyboard. I'm not a huge fan of the key action. I haven't ever used a Kindle (1 or 2), but these keys are shaped like small tic-tacs, and the action is much softer and less clicky than the keys on my Blackberry. On the other hand, I don't imagine one would be doing a heck of a lot of typing on the thing. And as you can see from the pictures, the keyboard is much more condensed (and less obtrusive) than on the other Kindles.

On the whole I think that Amazon is rapidly becoming the Apple of e-readers. I mean that in the best way possible. There are definitely still a few annoyances, and the lack of ePub support is disappointing, but on the whole I was extremely impressed by both the hardware and the UI design.