Reading with an ebook reader is such a wonderful experience. It’s just like reading an actual book, except that it has a lot more features and advantages. With an ebook reader, you can buy books at a cheaper price compared to regular dead tree books, keep thousands of books and bring them wherever you go, and keep the overall experience of reading an actual book with this device.
It is one of Amazon’s advocacy to make a lot of people get back to reading and make it an enjoyable and accessible leisure; thus the birth of the Kindle series of e-book readers. In this article, we are going to talk about the latest Kindle available in the market, the Kindle DX, and compare it with previous Kindle versions.
Features of the Amazon Kindle DX
The Kindle DX is very thin; only a third of an inch thick, and feels very sturdy and solid. But it is also quite heavy for an e-book reader, and users have the natural tendency to hold it with both hands. It has an on and off slider switch button on top, a head phone jack, a volume switch, stereospeakers at the bottom, and a charging port at the bottom.
E-Ink Display
One of the main issues regarding Kindle 2, Kindle DX’s predecessor, is the small size of its screen. A larger screen is very appealing for many reasons. One is that it comes much closer to occupying the same content that a normal book page would have. Kindle DX has a 9.7 inch display, which is about the whole size of Kindle 2. Because of this, reading magazines, books, blogs and newspapers, among others, is much more comfortable. There is also more room to display maps, tables and charts. This screen is not only large, its display is also very slick and beautiful. It has 16 shades of gray which displays wonderfully on the Kindle DX.
Making the display even more wonderful to behold is the built-in e-ink technology of this device. This technology makes the screen look like a printed page. Everything about it looks like paper; the font, the contrast between text and background, and the fact that it doesn’t have an eye-straining back light found in computer monitors. Also like paper, the Kindle DX screen does not produce glare when you read it outside on a sunny day or under a lamp light source.
Buying eBooks on the Kindle DX
Before you start reading, you need to buy books. For the Kindle DX, this is as easy as ABC! You don’t have to go anywhere or connect your e-book reader to a computer to start buying and downloading books. You can do it almost anywhere you are. The wireless ability to download books, and even surf the web, runs on technology much like that of a cellphone, which lets you text or call anywhere you are. You can buy a lot of books and store them in your Kindle DX. With its huge file capacity, you can have as many as 3,500 average-sized books in your device. That’s a lot of books to carry around with you.
Kindle DX PDF Support
When you start reading, you may come across a word that is unfamiliar with you. You can look up the meaning of that word using the built-in New Oxford American Dictionary. It’s as easy as navigating the screen cursor to where that word is, and the meaning will automatically appear at the bottom part of the screen. However, this is only available for the exclusive book format that the Kindle DX e-book reader supports. If you are reading a book format such as the popular PDF, this feature is not available. In fact, there is not much you can do with the pdf file except read it; the way it looks cannot be changed. It can be disorted along the sides due to the limited size width of the Kindle DX, but you can change the view from portrait to landscape by rotating the device to a 90-degree angle until it is in landscape view, and the distortion is reduced, if not totally eliminated.
Text-to-Speech on the Kindle DX
While reading, you occasionally need to rest your eyes for a few minutes. You don’t have to postpone your reading though. You can let the Kindle DX read for you. This device has a text-to-speech function like the Kindle 2. You can simply switch this function on, and you can listen to a male or female narrator do the reading for you while you’re resting or doing something else. The narration is not anywhere near the quality of an audio book and the narrator can sound mechanical sometimes, but this is not such a big deal.
While you are reading the Kindle DX, you can bring your habit of taking down notes with you with the take down notes and annotations feature. This is a great way to store your favorite quotes or passages from the book, including its location in the book, and save them for later use. Furthermore, while you are reading and taking down notes, you can also bring another habit with you if you like listening to music while reading. The Kindle DX supports mp3 music file formats and you can let them play in the background through a pretty loud and decent quality built-in speaker.
Amazon Kindle DX Drawbacks
The Kindle DX, as good as it seems, is not perfect. The following are some of its draw backs, starting with the keyboard. As previously mentioned, you can write notes with the Kindle DX and you do this by typing into the keyboard. However, you may find that the keyboard is not comfortable at all, at least for heavy typing. The keys look like little capsules, much smaller than those in Kindle 2, and because of the wider span of the Kindle DX, you tend to awkwardly extend your thumbs and type letter by letter. In addition, the other buttons are equally inefficient. Like in Kindle 2, the Home button and previous/next buttons are at the right side, and so are the menu and back buttons and the 5-way controller. What is missing is the previous/next button at the left side, which was a good idea to allow easy navigation even when the Kindle is on widescreen orientation.
One thing about the orientation is that it is too sensitive. It switches from portrait to landscape view or vice versa at a 45 degree angle, which can be annoying. This switching capability is due to the presence of an accelerometer inside the device. This orientation switching can be turned off, but that involves navigation through various menus which can be a bit too tedious for some users. Furthermore, this can affect your ability to retain landscape view for pdf files, the view preferred for most of these files, notwithstanding the fact that the Kindle DX does not support pdf file zooming.
Amazon Kindle DX Shopping Advice
Overall, it is a very good eBook reader. The screen is fantastic and it looks more like a book than the previous Kindles and most other e-book readers due to its size. Of course this increase in screen size also means this device is heavier than most e-book readers, and there are other revisions to be made, but if you are a book lover, there aren’t too many reasons why you shouldn’t buy the Kindle DX.
