I know the Amazon Kindle 2 ebook reader is not a photographic equipment but I thought readers of this blog might be interested in other electronic gadgets. I always been an avid reader and usually borrow books from the libraries in Singapore.  I  would be quite willing to buy books that are not available in the libraries or books that I would like to keep eg photography books.  Therefore I  was quite interested to know more about the Kindle. The other ebook reader I had tried was a small PDA.  It was hard to read using that and I got giddy after a while.

As of now, Amazon does not allow the Kindle to be shipped to Singapore even for the Kindle 2 International version.  However you can work around the problem by shipping to Vpost.

You may like to refer to this nice post by Jeff Yen on the workaround.  He also works out the cost of the Kindle 2 including the leather cover , the shipping & GST charges which is about S$471.  This is not a  cheap device if you are not into books.  However for an avid reader, having a mobile bookstore is well worth the money.

A quick test show that the Whispernet works on the Kindle 2 International version here in Singapore. However there is a catch,  you need to pay US$1.99 delivery charge in additional to the price of the book. The cool thing is you could surf the web using the simple web browser. It is good for text only site like gmail.com.

Kindle

I like it for these reasons :

• Monochrome screen, long battery life - Simplicity. Remember those monochrome screen handphones? I missed them for their long battery life per charge.  I never purchase a iPhone or other smartphone before their battery life cannot match their capabilities.
• Non glare &  Non Reflective screen - No glossy screen here. Just a screen that almost look like a page off a book.  You can read it under the sun unlike the normal LCD screen.
• Simple operations –  To go to the next page, you press one of the bigger than thumb size  ”Next Page” button. To go to the previous page, press the  ”Previous Page” button.  This 2 buttons would do 90% of what I need the Kindle to do.
• Personal Library on a smaller footprint – I have more reasons to buy more books for my Kindle as I no longer have to worry about the space the books will take up.  There are also free ebooks that you can get off Amazon store.

Any cons to this device? Of course. Here they are :

• Power switch –  Quite awkward to use it as it is small and I need to slide and release to set it to sleep mode or to wake it up from sleep mode. To power it off, I  need to  slide and hold for 4 seconds.  So usually I just wait for it to go sleep mode by itself after 10 mins of idle time.
• White only - I would prefer a black or darker tone for the Kindle 2 body. I would imagine the body especially the buttons to get dirty soon from my greasy fingers.
• The transitions of pages – Not the prettiest of all transitions. I would describe it as “scattering of ink”. How about a page flipping kind of transition?

Ok, I am off to read my book, Lost Symbol by Dan Brown on my Kindle of course.