My Kindle DX

by Mark Nijhof, in Improvement | Saturday, September 19, 2009 | 2 comments

A little over one week ago I got my Amazon Kindle DX delivered to me by my friendly uncle from Canada, whom first drove to a friend of his in the US to pick it up. And for this I am very thankful (and no I don’t think he reads my blog).

I have to say I am extremely happy with it, the clarity of the text and how easy it is on the eyes is truly amazing. As you may expect it is very important to me that I can read programing / developer books on this thing, I mean I didn’t get it to read novels on. And I can tell you that this works very nicely. I went for the more expensive DX version instead of the smaller Kindle 2 because the bigger screen size and its ability to display PDF’s.

The bigger screen size is very helpful for reading the code examples and various diagrams and drawings that appear regularly in the type of books that I like to read. Also because of the nature of PDF’s (fixed format) they will only scale to the size of the screen, so no rearranging of the text like with the Kindle and Mobi books. But I have to say that the Kindle DX is very good at removing the white margins and making the most use of the available screen real-estate. With some PDF’s I had to help a little bit by cropping them myself, but in most cases the Kindle did a much better job then me.

The size of the Kindle DX is about the same size as your regular programming book like your Evens DDD or the GOF book (both of which I hope they will released as Kindle books or PDF’s soon) only a lot thinner and not as heavy. And here comes the bonus, I can have a huge amount of books on here, I can take it to the office and where-ever I go. Great for reference and when you have some spare-time to just read.

Now the keyboard is not very useful at all, it is not balanced for handheld typing and to be able to use the numbers you have to press ALT before each number since they share the same buttons as to top line letters. Than again you are supposed to read not write on this thing, I guess it is good enough to make small annotations.

You have to learn to use the search abilities, just flipping thought the pages in order to find something is way to slow, it is not like a real book that you can just open . A good thing is that the search works on multiple books and even the PDF’s so finding a topic is pretty easy none the less.

Fun fact: After showing it to someone I immediately see if they are iPhone owners, those are the ones that immediately start touching the screen. Yeah that won’t do anything, and that is actually a shame.

So why the Kindle DX and not the Sony? Well because I buy my books at three locations, Amazon, Pragmatic Programmers and Mannings. The later two have both PDF’s and Pragmatic Programmers even has the Moby format, but Amazon (who gets most of my business) only has the Kindle format, which I believe is not one on one readable by the Sony one.

I took the liberty of creating some pictures from my Kindle DX, because I completely understand that you won’t take my word for the quality I say it has. You can click on the images to display them in a bigger size.