The Latest Kindle: Bigger, Not Better, Than Its Sibling
June 10, 2009
by Walter S. Mossberg
There’s a brand-new variant of the Amazon Kindle e-reader, and it’s available from the online bookseller starting this week.
This alternative Kindle, called the DX, is a super-size version of the popular Kindle 2, which arrived earlier this year. It sports a 9.7-inch screen, some 2.5 times as big as the surface area of the Kindle 2’s 6-inch display. It also sports a higher price tag — $489, versus $359 for its smaller sibling, which remains on the market.
Amazon’s Kindle DX
Like previous models, the Kindle DX allows you to shop for, and wirelessly download, any e-book in Amazon’s (AMZN) growing catalog — now about 275,000 titles. It uses the same easy-on-the-eyes screen technology as the smaller model but at a higher resolution. It still lacks color, and renders images only in gray scale. But the new DX adds a new capability: auto-rotation, which allows you to read in landscape mode.
This new, larger model isn’t primarily aimed at readers of standard books. It is targeted at three markets: textbooks, newspapers and other periodicals, and business documents in either Microsoft’s (MSFT) Word format or Adobe’s (ADBE) PDF format.
Unfortunately, I’ve been testing the Kindle DX and I didn’t like it nearly as much as the Kindle 2, which I own and enjoy using daily. While it performs its promised tasks adequately, I found that its size and weight made it awkward and tiring to hold for long periods of reading. It’s still fairly thin and light, but it’s 85% larger and heavier than the standard Kindle.
In addition, Amazon has degraded the user interface. To prevent the device from being even larger, the company had to remove the left-side page-turning buttons, confining all the controls to a vertical strip on the right. The keyboard at the bottom is also more vertically cramped.
If you’re left-handed, you have to spin the device around and rotate the screen to get buttons on the left, where they appear with their labels upside-down.
Similarly, if you choose to read in landscape mode, all the navigation controls, including the joystick for moving the cursor, will be awkwardly placed at either the top or bottom, far from where your hands are holding the device, and the keyboard essentially will be unusable.
In my view, the Kindle DX would have been a better product with on-screen touch controls that could instantly adapt to its size and orientation.
In reading standard books on the DX, I also encountered instances where the text on a page varied in shade from light gray to black.
I had mixed results with business documents. As with previous Kindles, you can either email personal documents to your device, for a fee, or drag them onto the Kindle via a cable, for free. But, unlike the smaller models, the new DX has PDF display capability built in, so it renders PDF files much more accurately than the older Kindles. That is a big improvement. It also allows you to view Excel and PowerPoint files if you save them in PDF format before sending them to your Kindle DX.
The Kindle DX, right, is a large-screen version of the popular Kindle e-reader, left.
I tried a variety of documents, and in many cases the results were great. The text was crisp, and the tables and graphics looked like they should. But I found that on some of these PDF documents, the text was too small to read. Yet, the Kindle lacks the ability to zoom in on PDF documents. You often can make the type larger by rotating to landscape mode, but this splits the PDFs into multiple pages, sometimes breaking them awkwardly.
Also, Amazon has raised its fees for converting and delivering business documents via email to all Kindles. The charge was formerly 10 cents a document. Now, it’s 15 cents per megabyte, which can add up if you load up your Kindle with lots of large documents. Most of my test documents, which were fairly small, cost over $1 each.
Newspapers looked about the same on the DX as they do on the smaller Kindles. Despite the larger screen, they don’t use traditional print or Web layouts, but a special Kindle layout that some users like a lot, but which I find annoying because it makes it harder to quickly scan multiple headlines.
The Kindle DX does have some nice touches. For the extra money, you not only get a larger screen, but also about twice the storage capacity. Also, because the screen is wider, you can adjust the margins on the DX, to obtain a line length that’s comfortable for your eyes and optimal for reading speed.
Amazon claims the same multiday battery life for the DX as for the Kindle 2. In my tests, I was able to go for several days of moderate reading without recharging, and much more if I turned off the wireless capability.
Although I wasn’t able to test college textbooks, I suspect they may be the killer app for this product. Many already are so expensive and heavy they could make the weight and price of the Kindle DX seem trivial in comparison.
But for standard books, I’d stick with the smaller, more comfortable Kindle 2.
Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.
Follow Walt on Twitter | Follow AllThingsD on Twitter
Comments
I thought this might make a good “large print” book reader for my mom. Attempting to do larger fonts on the smaller Kindle is pretty much a joke, as you can then only see a paragraph or so at a time.
Here, at least, a “large font” page would at least be a page.
Posted by Michael Long at June 10th, 2009 at 6:53 pmIf Amazon could bring the native PDF reading to the Kindle 2, I would probably agree that the larger DX model doesn’t bring much to the table. However, I think, aside from the larger format, the ability to self-load PDF documents without needing to go through Amazon’s email service is the key feature.
I am about to take a job where I’ll need literally hundreds of government-published regulations and guidance documents available. I will also be train commuting. Being able to have these handy and readable on the train makes the extra cost and size well worth it.
I’m sure the Kindle 2 is more than sufficient for the avid, recreational reader. The DX, however brings a few things to the table for academic or professional users that the Kindle 2 missed.
Posted by Joel Benge at June 11th, 2009 at 7:32 amI’ll be curious to see how the Kindles physically hold up over time. Laptops can take a beating in the hustle of everyday life. If a Kindle experiences similar wear, will people look to replace it or go back to paper.
Posted by Ken Okel at June 12th, 2009 at 7:49 amI don’t see how this device will be anything more than the latest overpriced gadget.
Of course you still need to pay more most of your downloads also.
In case nobody remembers, books are still free at the library.
Posted by tim kieper at June 13th, 2009 at 6:21 pmIf you eMail your document to @free.kindle.com there’s no charge.
You get an email with a link to the converted document. If your Kindle is attached to your PC you can download it directly.
Posted by Bob Wakefield at June 15th, 2009 at 12:55 pm