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catsittingstill · 03-26-2009, 12:39 PM

Review of the Kindle 2 (K2) compared to the Kindle 1 (K1)--Part 1 of 4

By Catsittingstill

Layout:

A common complaint with the K1 was that people were pressing the page turn buttons by accident. The K2's redesign of these buttons makes them easy to press deliberately (press the inside edge) but hard to press by accident. The K2 keyboard has round buttons without a space between the two halves of the keyboard; this is a downgrade in my opinion, as they require close focus to use. The tilted buttons and greater separation between sides of the K1 keyboard let me know where to put my thumbs without having to read the letters printed on the keys; the new design eliminates those landmarks. In addition I find I keep hitting the return key when I meant to hit the backspace/delete key—which wreaks havoc with web browsing, so be warned. (To be fair, I had this problem with the K1 also.) The old system of having commonly used punctuation marks available as "alt-6" or "alt-8" etc, is gone, and so is the @ key. However the new symbol menu takes full advantage of the joystick, and commonly used punctuation marks are closer to the default position, while rarely used ones are farther away, so well done on that.

Buttons and menu choices are somewhat rearranged; there are two new buttons on the right side (menu and home) which used to be a roller click and a button below the keyboard respectively. This is a trifle confusing for a K1 user moving to K2 but wasn't a problem after a few days of use. I will say that trying to use both simultaneously for side-by-side comparison is a bit confusing.

The K2 keyboard has also lost the search key; now one begins a search simply by typing the desired word or phrase, which works admirably as long as one can remember to do it that way. Search is also one of the options you reach by pressing the menu button; I think this kind of redundancy would be annoying if carried too far, but is quite a good idea for this kind of "cryptic" function.

Screen:

The K2 has grayscale with 16 shades, the K1 greyscale with 4 shades; the difference means that pictures (for instance on websites and in blogs and magazines) are much more interpretable on K2. At close quarters the K1 screen seems to have a little bit of "speckling" in the "white" parts, which I didn't observe with the K2—this could be unique to my individual Kindle 1, of course. I recall noticing it particularly with text rather than pictures. On both screens the "whites" are grayish, not truly white. The "greyishness" seems roughly equal between the two screens.

Text quality and fonts

The K2 has slightly lighter text than the K1; I think the lines that draw the letters are a little thinner. I did not have a problem reading the lighter text, but wouldn't mind an "embolden" function.

The fonts of the book ("His Majesty's Dragon" in this case) look the same to me, aside from the slightly thinner lines of the K2. However the home screen of the K1 uses a sans serif font, and the home screen of the K2 uses a serif font that is noticeably less heavy. The menu on both is in a sans serif font; I think it's the same font on both, but can't be sure. Also the menu choices look slightly jaggy on the K1 and smoother on the K2—actually that's true of the underlining too. Interesting. I don't see this difference in books or blogs, just in the menus. I suppose it may be due to the greater possibilities for anti-aliasing on a screen with 16 greys. (Note that fonts in topaz books can be different from the standard Kindle fonts; as far as I can tell, "His Majesty's Dragon" is not a topaz book.)

Amount of text on screen

This comparison is complicated by the fact that the K2 allows the reader to change line spacing by (within a book) holding down the shift and alt keys together while pressing a number. Smaller numbers give more closely spaced lines. Alt-2 and Alt-1 give the same results as far as I can tell. Alt-3 and higher give more widely spaced lines. This means that the K2 generally displays more lines of text. This does not work in the home screen, worse luck; I sure wouldn't mind being able to display more than 10 titles at a time.

User Interface:

Home screen.

K1 shows 12 titles at a time, K2 only ten. But K2 shows how material is sorted, in addition to what (books, periodicals, all) is being shown. In addition, K2 has a new category "personal documents" which apparently consists of the documents you e-mail to Amazon and have loaded on your Kindle via whispernet. Documents loaded via USB apparently just show up as "books." Since the new category would seem to be just a software change, I'm surprised it hasn't shown up on Kindle 1, but my K1 shows no sign of it.

Joystick

The joystick is slower in vertical response than the roller; the roller can get from top to bottom of the home screen in about a second and a half; the joystick takes about 4 seconds if you hold it down continuously. (On a page of second-to-smallest text, it takes about 8 seconds to joystick from bottom to top if you hold it down.) It does not have much problem with overshooting, however, which I think helps. Where the joystick really shines is the ability to move left and right, instead of having to select a whole line, as the roller must. That means that several choices can be placed on a line, which makes the user interface much more efficient.

For example highlighting a title in the home screen gives a menu of choices that are much harder to get to on the K1. You can twitch the joystick left and have the option of deleting the item; (with the 1.2 update for K1 you can press the delete key on the keyboard to delete items with similar ease; before the update it was necessary to go into the content manager to delete and then back out again when you were done.) You can twitch the joystick to the right, and get a page-sized menu for that book that lets you go to the beginning of the book, or to a particular location (in addition to the last page read, which is redundant; there are quicker ways to get there from the home screen), or –what I think is really nice—you can search just that book for something. I don't know of any way to restrict a K1 search to just one book, (aside from the dictionary) and I really like this feature. Or you can go to "my notes and marks" for the book, or delete the book (again redundant; quicker to twitch left from the homescreen. But I don't mind the redundancy; you shouldn't have to remember too much to use a device). Didn't mean to delete, or to enter the book menu? Just twitch the joystick back the other way and you're back at the homescreen. I think this is a big improvement in ease-of-use.

Menus

Menus on the K1 all have a "close" choice at the top for backing out of the menu without picking any choices from it. Menus on the K2 are toggled from the menu button; a second press closes the menu without picking any of the choices.

03-26-2009, 12:39 PM	#1
catsittingstill Guru Posts: 643 Karma: 551634 Join Date: Dec 2007 Device: Kindle 1.0.8, iPod Touch, Kindle Keyboard	Kindle 2 compared to Kindle 1, a review Review of the Kindle 2 (K2) compared to the Kindle 1 (K1)--Part 1 of 4 By Catsittingstill Layout: A common complaint with the K1 was that people were pressing the page turn buttons by accident. The K2's redesign of these buttons makes them easy to press deliberately (press the inside edge) but hard to press by accident. The K2 keyboard has round buttons without a space between the two halves of the keyboard; this is a downgrade in my opinion, as they require close focus to use. The tilted buttons and greater separation between sides of the K1 keyboard let me know where to put my thumbs without having to read the letters printed on the keys; the new design eliminates those landmarks. In addition I find I keep hitting the return key when I meant to hit the backspace/delete key—which wreaks havoc with web browsing, so be warned. (To be fair, I had this problem with the K1 also.) The old system of having commonly used punctuation marks available as "alt-6" or "alt-8" etc, is gone, and so is the @ key. However the new symbol menu takes full advantage of the joystick, and commonly used punctuation marks are closer to the default position, while rarely used ones are farther away, so well done on that. Buttons and menu choices are somewhat rearranged; there are two new buttons on the right side (menu and home) which used to be a roller click and a button below the keyboard respectively. This is a trifle confusing for a K1 user moving to K2 but wasn't a problem after a few days of use. I will say that trying to use both simultaneously for side-by-side comparison is a bit confusing. The K2 keyboard has also lost the search key; now one begins a search simply by typing the desired word or phrase, which works admirably as long as one can remember to do it that way. Search is also one of the options you reach by pressing the menu button; I think this kind of redundancy would be annoying if carried too far, but is quite a good idea for this kind of "cryptic" function. Screen: The K2 has grayscale with 16 shades, the K1 greyscale with 4 shades; the difference means that pictures (for instance on websites and in blogs and magazines) are much more interpretable on K2. At close quarters the K1 screen seems to have a little bit of "speckling" in the "white" parts, which I didn't observe with the K2—this could be unique to my individual Kindle 1, of course. I recall noticing it particularly with text rather than pictures. On both screens the "whites" are grayish, not truly white. The "greyishness" seems roughly equal between the two screens. Text quality and fonts The K2 has slightly lighter text than the K1; I think the lines that draw the letters are a little thinner. I did not have a problem reading the lighter text, but wouldn't mind an "embolden" function. The fonts of the book ("His Majesty's Dragon" in this case) look the same to me, aside from the slightly thinner lines of the K2. However the home screen of the K1 uses a sans serif font, and the home screen of the K2 uses a serif font that is noticeably less heavy. The menu on both is in a sans serif font; I think it's the same font on both, but can't be sure. Also the menu choices look slightly jaggy on the K1 and smoother on the K2—actually that's true of the underlining too. Interesting. I don't see this difference in books or blogs, just in the menus. I suppose it may be due to the greater possibilities for anti-aliasing on a screen with 16 greys. (Note that fonts in topaz books can be different from the standard Kindle fonts; as far as I can tell, "His Majesty's Dragon" is not a topaz book.) Amount of text on screen This comparison is complicated by the fact that the K2 allows the reader to change line spacing by (within a book) holding down the shift and alt keys together while pressing a number. Smaller numbers give more closely spaced lines. Alt-2 and Alt-1 give the same results as far as I can tell. Alt-3 and higher give more widely spaced lines. This means that the K2 generally displays more lines of text. This does not work in the home screen, worse luck; I sure wouldn't mind being able to display more than 10 titles at a time. User Interface: Home screen. K1 shows 12 titles at a time, K2 only ten. But K2 shows how material is sorted, in addition to what (books, periodicals, all) is being shown. In addition, K2 has a new category "personal documents" which apparently consists of the documents you e-mail to Amazon and have loaded on your Kindle via whispernet. Documents loaded via USB apparently just show up as "books." Since the new category would seem to be just a software change, I'm surprised it hasn't shown up on Kindle 1, but my K1 shows no sign of it. Joystick The joystick is slower in vertical response than the roller; the roller can get from top to bottom of the home screen in about a second and a half; the joystick takes about 4 seconds if you hold it down continuously. (On a page of second-to-smallest text, it takes about 8 seconds to joystick from bottom to top if you hold it down.) It does not have much problem with overshooting, however, which I think helps. Where the joystick really shines is the ability to move left and right, instead of having to select a whole line, as the roller must. That means that several choices can be placed on a line, which makes the user interface much more efficient. For example highlighting a title in the home screen gives a menu of choices that are much harder to get to on the K1. You can twitch the joystick left and have the option of deleting the item; (with the 1.2 update for K1 you can press the delete key on the keyboard to delete items with similar ease; before the update it was necessary to go into the content manager to delete and then back out again when you were done.) You can twitch the joystick to the right, and get a page-sized menu for that book that lets you go to the beginning of the book, or to a particular location (in addition to the last page read, which is redundant; there are quicker ways to get there from the home screen), or –what I think is really nice—you can search just that book for something. I don't know of any way to restrict a K1 search to just one book, (aside from the dictionary) and I really like this feature. Or you can go to "my notes and marks" for the book, or delete the book (again redundant; quicker to twitch left from the homescreen. But I don't mind the redundancy; you shouldn't have to remember too much to use a device). Didn't mean to delete, or to enter the book menu? Just twitch the joystick back the other way and you're back at the homescreen. I think this is a big improvement in ease-of-use. Menus Menus on the K1 all have a "close" choice at the top for backing out of the menu without picking any choices from it. Menus on the K2 are toggled from the menu button; a second press closes the menu without picking any of the choices.