Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Okay, not yet a complete week. It's only been five days. Monday got off to a bang. My first experiments were very promising. I put several PDF files on the Kindle DX to see if they would be readable. To my delight, the programmers were smart enough to use the media bounding box and not the page size to determine what to draw on screen. The page margins are redundant on the Kindle. The device's plastic border serves as a margin. Let's see what this puppy can do. I throw some LaTeX generated pdfs on it. The older of these files use Postscript Type 3 embedded fonts. They use bit mapped fonts set designed for a specific device resolution--a 600 dpi printer. The Kindle scales everything beautifully. Nice. I put some papers from SIGGRAPH meetings on my Kindle. These pdfs contain a lot of color graphics. It's the Special Interest Group Graphics of the ACM after all. I don't expect much, but let's stress the system. Even with only 16 grey levels, Kindle manages to produce a reasonable representation of the figures. It kind of takes me back to days of viewing images on my old Mac Plus. The algorithms have been around for years. Even given the low dynamic range of E-ink, they manage to do a pretty good job. The results are serviceable for the platform. No real complaints here. SIGGRAPH papers are double column and printed on paper that is bigger than the Kindle DX. Even just zooming on the media bounding box, the fonts are kind of small. Tuesday. Let's start moving journal articles over to the Kindle. These are papers purchased from places like the Journal of Physical Chemistry, etc.. Hmm, double column articles with complex mathematics are a bit of a problem in portrait mode. By the time you put an exponent on a term in the numerator of a term in the denominator of an integral, the font size is getting pretty small. Turn the Kindle to enter landscape mode. Everything rescales, and the math is readable again. But a complete page doesn't fit on screen. I expected that. Just click the next page button. When the Kindle is sideways, the buttons are in an awkward position. Rats. Furthermore, the article is two column. In landscape mode, you have to hit those buttons a lot. Next page, next page, previous page, next page...zig-zagging my way through the text. I think I'll stick to portrait mode except when I need to really see the equations in detail. Wednesday. My hobby is history. A few months back, I downloaded the complete set of scanned PDFs of the Nuremburg trials. The National Archives have them available for download. They are government documents so they aren't protected by copyright. They are no longer in print, and buying the full set from used book dealers would cost thousands of dollars. The full set of scanned documents is about 2 gigabytes of files. I only have 3.3 gigabytes of storage available. I probably don't want to take up all of my space with just these files. I put a few volumes on the Kindle. The pages are rendered clearly. I can still search the OCR'ed text of the files. It's a shame there isn't sufficient room to put them all on my Kindle. Thursday. I need to replace the hard drive and add memory to my laptop. I download the PDF manual from the manufacturer to get instructions. Success! The Kindle is perfect for this job. Laptop is disassembled while flipping through the pages of the manual. I didn't have to print out the instructions. Uh-oh. Suddenly realized that there is no password protection on the Kindle. I have a few business documents on it which I'm going to have to remove. Why can't I password protect this thing? It's so tempting to put business documents on it. I'll have to remember not to do that. If I lose my Kindle, it could be a problem. Trying to read my Kindle in bed. I've got nearly a hundred pdf files on the Kindle now. I've been cleaning out my filing cabinets of software manuals and printed copies of papers. It's starting to get cluttered. Dragging files into folders organizes them on the Kindle's disk, but the table of contents still only has one level. I have to flip through several pages of titles to find the article that I want. Friday. Why is this thing getting slow? Turning the pages on some of my pdfs takes 30 or 40 seconds. Uh-oh, some of these pages aren't being scaled correctly. The fonts are tiny. The text only partially fills the screen. This page rendered perfectly yesterday. What gives? I think they may have a memory leak. Is there some way to make this thing reboot? Simply putting it to sleep isn't going to solve the problem. Beginning to get frustrated. Some pages render correctly, others do not. Performance is random and degrading. I think I'll write a review. My final review is mixed. A very promising device with several serious faults.