04-13-2009, 04:02 PM
Incidentally, I took the plunge and bought a Kindle 2. I like it a great deal.
I'll have to try the speakers when I get home. I tried the text-to-speech over headphones (there's a headphone jack on the top) and it's not bad but I wasn't overly impressed with it. They need some options for changing the voice, pace, etc -- apparently it's still an "experimental" feature, though, so I expect it'll improve over time.
As far as reading goes, though, it's great. Very easy on the eyes. No different than a book, really. The technology behind the screen is pretty interesting -- not sure what they're calling it, but it's not an LCD screen. It's more like an "Etch-a-sketch". Once the page is drawn, it takes no power to hold the image. It's like a high resolution, very low framerate gray scale display.
The only physical feature I would change is to slightly increase the size of the keyboard. They could have rearranged things a bit and added another solid inch to the keyboard width. Not that you need to use it much.
I also just found out I could highlight and save "clippings" from things I'm reading, like quotes, which goes into a menu item on the home page. I'm always finding funny Pratchett quotes I'd like to store, so that's nice. It probably said how to do this in the manual, but who reads manuals?
Anyway, if the speakers end up not being good, you could always hook up some battery powered speakers through the earphone jack or something.
I'll have to try the speakers when I get home. I tried the text-to-speech over headphones (there's a headphone jack on the top) and it's not bad but I wasn't overly impressed with it. They need some options for changing the voice, pace, etc -- apparently it's still an "experimental" feature, though, so I expect it'll improve over time.
As far as reading goes, though, it's great. Very easy on the eyes. No different than a book, really. The technology behind the screen is pretty interesting -- not sure what they're calling it, but it's not an LCD screen. It's more like an "Etch-a-sketch". Once the page is drawn, it takes no power to hold the image. It's like a high resolution, very low framerate gray scale display.
The only physical feature I would change is to slightly increase the size of the keyboard. They could have rearranged things a bit and added another solid inch to the keyboard width. Not that you need to use it much.
I also just found out I could highlight and save "clippings" from things I'm reading, like quotes, which goes into a menu item on the home page. I'm always finding funny Pratchett quotes I'd like to store, so that's nice. It probably said how to do this in the manual, but who reads manuals?
Anyway, if the speakers end up not being good, you could always hook up some battery powered speakers through the earphone jack or something.