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85 percent more battery life and native PDF reader for newest Kindle: Previous buyers can get upgrades of latest-gen machine
November 24, 2009 | 1:02 pm
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By David Rothman
Here’s a Google news roundup. News release from Amazon follows. I’ll welcome reaction from owners of the new machines who upgrade. How well does PDF display, for example? And what do you think of the page rotation feature? Upgrade info—including some new wrinkles for DX owners—is here.– D.R.
The latest-generation Kindle has gotten two new enhancements—85 percent more battery life and a native PDF reader. Previous buyers of the newest models can receive both as upgrades.
Kindle now has battery life of up to seven days even with wireless turned on, a significant improvement from the previous battery life of four days. Battery life with wireless turned off remains at the previous level of up to two weeks.
Battery power management for portable wireless devices is a complex technical area, and the battery life improvement announced today is the result of a six month firmware improvement and testing program.
Amazon also announced today that the 6-inch Kindle now has a built-in native PDF reader that enables Kindle customers to read professional and personal documents in their original PDF format without conversion. Kindle is in stock and available for immediate shipment today.
“Kindle, already the #1 bestselling, most wished for, and most gifted product on all of Amazon.com, is now even better—with 85 percent more battery life and a built-in PDF reader,” said Ian Freed, Vice President, Amazon Kindle. “These two significant enhancements are available now.”
To read their personal or professional documents, Kindle customers simply email PDFs to their Kindle email address or move them over using a USB connection. Customers that prefer to have their PDF documents converted to the Kindle format simply type "Convert" in the subject of the e-mail when sending documents to their “@kindle.com” address.
Amazon also announced today that previous purchasers of the new Kindle will also receive the 85 percent battery life improvements with wireless on, and native PDF support via a firmware update automatically delivered via Whispernet wireless. Native PDF support will also be available for some earlier versions of Kindle via an automatic Whispernet wireless firmware update.
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Comments:
I have a DX, updated to version 2.3.
They’ve changed some other stuff:
1) Blog subscriptions updates all stay in the list of all my items; I now have 8 versions of the New York Times Latest News blog, for example.
2) Subscription items no longer have the “progress dots” under the title. Harder to tell what I’ve finished reading. PDF’s still have them.
3) PDF change: IN portrait mode, PDF’s are rendered as always, full page, as defined in the document. Only in landscape mode will wide margins not be displayed. This makes the apparent “magnification” when going into landscape mode even larger.
Menus look the same, though the entry to “disable annotations backup” (menu/settings/menu) may be new…never used it before, so I’m not sure.
Thanks, Bruce. Also of interest:
1, Font Hack won’t stick. You might have to get rid of it.
2. The dictionary probably won’t work with the PDF.
3. Same for search.
This is based on others’ experience. For some reason, my own upgrade to my Kindle 2 isn’t sticking even without the font modification and even though I’ve changed settings back to factory default. The good news is that my books are safe since I copied ‘em over before doing the reset. They show up again.
Thanks,
David
So, those of us who spent big bucks for the first generation kindle are consigned to the no new feature ghetto? If so, Amazon has lost me for life as an ereader and ebook customer.
I have an old Kindle 2. I’ve downloaded and installed the update and am quite pleased with it. It installs very smoothly by following the instructions at Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200324680). So the update works on ALL Kindle 2′s.
I can now switch to landscape mode manually using the Aa key manually, though not automatically. I can now read PDFs, search them, and bookmark in them. I still can’t zoom and no reflowing is performed; switching from portrait to landscape mode does provide a limited zooming capability, though.
I can’t comment on battery life, but any improved power management will be welcomed. Since I normally keep the wireless off, though, it won’t help me much.
All in all, a very pleasant surprise and a helpful update. Now onward and upward toward folders and/or tags. Thanks, Amazon!
OK, folks, the update is working on my Kindle 2. Turns out that a revert-to-factory-default won’t undo hack. You need to install the remove-hack file from the hack-related site.
Thanks to everyone sharing impressions on the upgrade (more welcome!), and a quick comment to Binko: I myself would side with Amazon in this particular case. You can’t expect all upgrades to apply to all machines, just as Sony had problems at first with the Sony PRS-500. It’s possible that the technical capability isn’t there within the original Kindle. That said, it would be nice if Amazon followed Sony’s example and in some way rewarded first-Kindle-gen purchasers, beyond providing a marketplace for the original Kindles.
Thanks,
David
That’s a good point, David. And I accept it to a certain degree. But first generation buyers were pretty much promised that more features would be “coming soon”. Now, when the first major feature update arrives, we are left out.
Big corporations like Amazon constantly push the consumer in a lot of subtle ways to buy new stuff and repurchase new versions of old stuff. My feeling here is that Amazon no longer has any concern at all for Kindle 1 owners.
I like my Kindle 1. But I don’t like the way Amazon has handled the Kindle hardware progression. And I hate, despise and avoid DRM. I only buy an occassional throwaway casual reading ebook from Amazon. Other than that I just read free books.
I’m sure my next ereader will be from another vendor and hopefully, by then, readers will have some real rights and control over the expensive ebooks that they “buy”.
For what its worth; aside from the native pdf support, the big ticket item in this update is the new battery management software. Which happens to be hardware dependent. It may be that whatever changes they’ve made don’t apply to the K1 hardware. Would be nice if they came out and said so, though.
Re: DX update
Pro:
Change from 5 minutes to 20 minutes delay to sleep is good.
The ability to command a pdf to Amazon file conversion is potentially excellent, but time will tell.
Con:
The fact that the only pdf size control is still just portrait/landscape means that any weakness in vision makes the DX close to useless for pdf’s. The changes in both portrait and landscape modes are likely backward steps on balance. One of the pdf files I tested after upgrade now has portrait text that is way, way too small and landscape text that is way too large.
No battery life improvement.
Regards, Don
Not bad, all-in-all. Nothing great but nothing bad either. Of note:
1- Four-way screen rotation works for ebooks and pdfs and the 5-way controller and the menus re-orient as expected. (Not all ebook readers that support rotation do it right.)
2- ebooks get three margin settings but no zero-margin option, alas. Would be handy at larger font sizes.
pdfs display as well as can be expected on a 6-in screen. No reflow. Portrait fits to height, Landscape fits to width, which mean there is overlap between the first half-page and the second half page. Not very useful for text documents but it worked fine for graphic-heavy brochures and blueprints. I fed it a Google crapscan that crashes other pdf viewers I’ve tried and it worked about as well as can expected; very slow but workable. Text documents are searchable and the search item is highlighted.
Basically it brings the K2 up to DX spec.
“The ability to command a pdf to Amazon file conversion is potentially excellent, but time will tell.”
Apparently the commanded pdf to Amazon conversion with ‘Convert’ in the email subject is not yet functional. I have been promised an email notification when it is fixed.
Regards, Don
I’m AMAZED that no one (including Amazon) has mentioned that they completely FIXED the “jagged right margin” problem that has been present in K2 since the beginning. I switched from the Sony PRS-505 a year ago, and this has BUGGED me from day one.
Especially considering the iPhone Kindle app did a beautiful job of “full justification”.
It was the first thing I noticed after the Kindle 2.3 update was applied, and I was overjoyed.
The 2nd thing I noticed is how bad the Kindle2 default fonts still suck. Luckily some very helpful folks have already released my favorite font “hack” (the Georgia2 one, which again looks a LOT like the Sony) in a format compatible with Kindle2 US, International and DX.
http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showpost.php?p=669457&postcount=61
What a great support community this Kindle has!
Huh. I personally don’t want full justification in my e-books, as the spaces that open between words on short lines actively annoy me.
Oh heck–they’ve gone to full justification as a default? I hope there’s some way to turn it off, at least?
I downloaded and installed the 2.3 for my international Kindle. All went very smoothly. However, Two days after leaving the Kindle on my bed-side table, the battery is dead. Not sure why. Even if left on, it should have turned itself off.
Charging battery now, will be watching it closely.
Anybody else with similar issues? I’ve not done any hacks on the machine.
“Our engineers have solved the problem with your PDF files not being able to convert to Kindle format AZW. You should now be able to convert your files by emailing them to our conversion service with “convert” in the subject line. I’m sorry for any inconvenience this has caused.”
Notification of pdf conversion fix from Amazon. I have verified that a pdf file that previously would not convert when sent to a DX now does convert when using the ‘convert’ subject line.
Regards, Don