New Gadgets

We gadget nerds have to endure unspeakable atrocities in order to slake that early adoption jones: first-run gear shipped DOA, buggy pre-release software, and months of waiting after a product leaks only to be greeted by a jacked-up price premium at launch. So we feel your pain, original Kindle owners, after Amazon announced a major firmware update that brings native PDF support to the 6-inch Kindle 2 and DX readers with the promise of a staggering 85% increase in battery life to all Kindle 2 devices — if you haven’t already received it OTA, the 2.3 software update is now available for download and installation via USB tethering. At least owners of “some earlier versions of Kindle” (quote from the press release) will receive native PDF support whenever the 1st generation firmware update (currently at version 1.2) is released. It’s worth noting that Amazon’s PDF reader lacks a zoom function which makes many PDFs entirely unreadable on the device. Good thing Amazon’s store is chock full of easily zoomable books in a proprietary format then, huh?

At Digital Publishing Fair in Tokyo, Chinese developers have submitted a prototype of its reader, which is very similar to Kindle 2. However, Chinese have stated that “these two devices have nothing in common”.

But judge yourself. 6-inch screen and almost the same appearance certainly suggest that there were no borrowings. The main differences between the gadgets are a form of buttons, and the location of the logo.

But the Chinese model has another important difference. Judging by the use of SIM cards for connecting to wireless networks, the gadget will support GSM connections. For countries where there is no significant 3G coverage, it’s quite useful.
The price of the Chinese reader will be $210.