Quote:
Originally Posted by Romasport
Hello everyone!
I'm brazilian and in a few days I will travel to US on vacations. Since I am an avid reader, my first purchase when arrive there, will be a Kindle 2! I have read a lot about it (thanks so much to you all guys), already converted some of my pdfs, prepared my MOBI ebooks, got everything about the fonts hacks and so on...
My last two questions are:
1) Since there are a lot of devices in the market and many of you have owned the kindle 2 for a long time, could you please tell me, considering the circunstances and your practical usage, if it is still the best purchase for the money (U$260,00)?
2) If not, why (other recommendations)?
Thanks a lot!
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Olá
The Kindle is okay, though it has some strange limitations. Its screen isn't better than, say, the $200 USD Sony PRS-300, just a little larger. Same pixel count, but more space between them. The store of Amazon's in the US is pretty much the best store available for commercial works. However, I have no bearing whatsoever on the Brazilian facing offering. I personally own a Kindle 2 now, but I have also owned a Sony PRS-505, and also I read a lot on my iPhone 3G S.
At this point, I am somewhat regretful that I sold the PRS-505 and got the Kindle. Though I do like whispersync tracking my bookmarks, I feel like Amazon is not a trustworthy company and that their strategy of exclusion makes them particularly unfriendly to the eBook movement.
Furthermore, the Kindle 2 has no real PDF support and the PDF conversion service offered by Amazon is really terrible. The Sony readers all have native PDF support, more than good enough for PDF formatted novels, and decent for regular PDFs.
Also, the Kindle has no ePub support, and burgeoning industry standard format, and a format I would not underestimate given the announced plans of Amazon's competition.
The Kindle comes with a keyboard which I have thus far found worse then useless while reading fiction, and extremely tedious when I have used it. Because the format support on the Kindle is too poor to make any reasonable business or school use of the device, the annotations support is meaningless to me. I would rather have a smaller reader to be honest.
All that said, my current overall reader device disposition is that this size makes very little sense. I can just as comfortably read on a smaller screen, 3.5-4" or so is just fine because I"m no old geezer and can turn the fonts down. At this point, I plan to purchase a large format dedicated reading device, such as the Plastic Logic QUE when it's practical. I believe at this size I will have far more uses for the device and it will not be easily supplanted by my iPhone.
Plus, in regards to reading on my iPhone, I have kindle access anyway, plus other eBook reader stores and programs. And a major bonus is that I can comfortably read in poorly lit areas which is the majority of the areas I inhabit. Oh yeah and it's always in my pocket anyway.
I think amazon is doing a great job wooing people with their advertising, but, honestly the differentiating features are not worth the exclusion in my opinion. I find the wireless access unbearably slow, so slow that it's far faster for me to just use my computer or my iPhone to make kindle store purchases and I get a much better user experience that way anyway.
These are, of course, my own opinions for my own scenario. I hope they help you make your decision and that you enjoy whatever you decide to do.