4 ms·

I ordered a kindle yesterday ($250, 1/2 of the iPad price, for a refurbished DX from amazon warehouse deals was just irresistible) and even though I do not have

I ordered a kindle yesterday ($250, 1/2 of the iPad price, for a refurbished DX from amazon warehouse deals was just irresistible) and even though I do not have any first hand experience yet, I think that the device has a lot of potential. I have a lot of PDF textbooks that I never get around to read because I just cannot read on a computer for longer periods of time. Therefore, I intend to use the kindle for reading through the textbook the first time I work my way through it (which will likely take a long time and therefore the e-ink comes in handy) and search through the PDF on my computer if I, at some point in the future, need to reference something. As far as I know kindle caches pages before and after the current page and accessing these pages is exactly the type of movement that one performs then reading through a textbook the first time through. Can anyone who has experience with kindle say if my assumptions wrong?

ghshephard 16y ago
You may want to consider returning the Kindle DX if your use case is PDF reading, particularly if you have any complex graphics, and absolutely if random flipping through the document occurs. I own a K1 and K2 - and nothing beats them, not even paper, for bright sunlight reading. I had a DX for about a week, but found that the page flipping performance in textbook class PDFs, particularly when I was looking for a random page was poor, and, the Achilles's heel - complex graphics took several seconds to render. The iPad is a better tool for that use case, and, with dropbox + goodreader, it takes me all of 5 seconds to bounce my PDF onto my iPad for future reading (With the bonus that my iPhone now has access to the same PDFs, and, I have full access to color documents.) I do 100% of my summer reading outside on my Kindle, though - wouldn't even attempt it on an iPad, even with the matte screen that I've added.
- anemecek 16y ago
  Actually the thing that sold me on kindle was that you can use dropbox with it as well, trough the dropbox website interface. I can imagine that it will be a sub-par experience and probably it will not take 5 seconds but oh well. And yes, the plan was to try it out and return it in the worst case.
  - weaksauce 16y ago
    The iPad has a dropbox app too. It allows you to open up pdfs, word docs, and other items.
sliverstorm 16y ago
That is a rocking deal. You're right, pretty irresistible. Only reason I haven't already pulled the trigger is I get the feeling a new model will be released soon. Unfortunately, navigating from page to page on the Kindles is slow. With my Kindle 2, it's like 'click... page load... page refresh.. done', takes about 2-3 seconds. That's a long time when you are flipping through pages. I can't speak for PDF's specifically, but the real limitation is the screen, so I imagine they are about the same.
- potatolicious 16y ago
  I bought my father a Kindle DX - he enjoys it, but I would not be able to stand it. Call us the spoiled computing generation - but with complex graphics-laden PDFs, the Kindle can take up to ten seconds to change page. That's ludicrous and, and it alone wipes out any advantage e-ink has over backlit. The entirety of the Kindle software is really, really slow. I'm not convinced this is simply a matter of the e-ink display - even things that do not force a full refresh of the display incur large wait times.

ghshephard 16y ago

You may want to consider returning the Kindle DX if your use case is PDF reading, particularly if you have any complex graphics, and absolutely if random flipping through the document occurs. I own a K1 and K2 - and nothing beats them, not even paper, for bright sunlight reading. I had a DX for about a week, but found that the page flipping performance in textbook class PDFs, particularly when I was looking for a random page was poor, and, the Achilles's heel - complex graphics took several seconds to render. The iPad is a better tool for that use case, and, with dropbox + goodreader, it takes me all of 5 seconds to bounce my PDF onto my iPad for future reading (With the bonus that my iPhone now has access to the same PDFs, and, I have full access to color documents.) I do 100% of my summer reading outside on my Kindle, though - wouldn't even attempt it on an iPad, even with the matte screen that I've added.

anemecek 16y ago
Actually the thing that sold me on kindle was that you can use dropbox with it as well, trough the dropbox website interface. I can imagine that it will be a sub-par experience and probably it will not take 5 seconds but oh well. And yes, the plan was to try it out and return it in the worst case.
- weaksauce 16y ago
  The iPad has a dropbox app too. It allows you to open up pdfs, word docs, and other items.

sliverstorm 16y ago

That is a rocking deal. You're right, pretty irresistible. Only reason I haven't already pulled the trigger is I get the feeling a new model will be released soon. Unfortunately, navigating from page to page on the Kindles is slow. With my Kindle 2, it's like 'click... page load... page refresh.. done', takes about 2-3 seconds. That's a long time when you are flipping through pages. I can't speak for PDF's specifically, but the real limitation is the screen, so I imagine they are about the same.

potatolicious 16y ago
I bought my father a Kindle DX - he enjoys it, but I would not be able to stand it. Call us the spoiled computing generation - but with complex graphics-laden PDFs, the Kindle can take up to ten seconds to change page. That's ludicrous and, and it alone wipes out any advantage e-ink has over backlit. The entirety of the Kindle software is really, really slow. I'm not convinced this is simply a matter of the e-ink display - even things that do not force a full refresh of the display incur large wait times.