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Friday, August 19, 2011

Building A Better Kindle (or whats wrong with the Kindle 3)

Lets be honest, the Kindle 3 is FUCKING SHIT.
I'm not going to piss about here, I want to say what I mean and fuck Amazon if they can't handle an honest opinion.

I've owned my Kindle 3 (wifi only) now since mid April.
As a device for reading books its pretty darn good. But its got a LOT of faults.

If you look into the history of the Kindle 2 and the original Kindle you can see how good they were.
And what a complete piece of shit the Kindle 3 actually is.

The Kindle 2 had a changeable battery. That's been removed in the Kindle 3, you can't even access the battery in that. So there's reason 1 to hate the Kindle 3 right there, once the battery won't take a charge any more you've got a device thats no longer functional. You've got to ask WHY Amazon decided they didn't want us users changing the battery in our Kindle 3.

Probably to make us buy another Kindle. Not happening in this lifetime Amazon.

Again if you look at the Kindle 2 it had a numeric keypad. That's gone as well, replaced by a SYM key. It's as annoying as hell to use, especially if you have any long numbers to enter. Bring back the numeric keys.

The Kindle 2 also had bigger keys, I bet they were easier to press. The K3's keys are INSANELY small. And rounded. And real easy to miss and also pretty hard to press in. The K2 had square keys, they look so much nicer & easier to use.

Functionality out of the box. Frankly this is my biggest gripe with Amazon & the K3. There is SO much the K3 won't do unless its been registered via wifi. You can't set the clock, you can't make collections, you can't name the Kindle.

All you are limited to is putting books on, reading them, setting bookmarks & using the dictionary.

Ah, the dictionary. Another gripe. Is there any reason why Amazon think British customers will want an American dictionary? Most British adults will be more than aware how badly Americans mangle spellings of certain words yet you can't delete that dictionary. Why not? Surely the K3's drive space is mine to use as I wish?

PDF's. A major bugbear since the original Kindle from what I read. Surely being in its 3rd incarnation the device should be able to do some tinkering with a PDF? Nope, just view it from different positions. You can't even fucking ZOOM in for crying out loud? Even the worst cheapest PDF readers offer that option.

I think all these issues say a lot about Amazon. The fact they don't even give you ANY kind of cover for the device (and trust me it's extremely flimsy & looks very easy to break if it dropped from any kind of height) to offer any kind of splash or water protection or protection for the screen.

Its instructions aren't great (especially not for a Kindle novice) and it's not very helpful about charging times, especially for its intial 1st out of the box charge. The information both the paper and electronic instructions give is wrong (it says charge for 3 hours but it is supposed to be charged for 6 hours on its very 1st charge.)

It could do with having a much wider range of fonts and USB internet access (which apparently the K2 had but was removed for the K3).

So there you are. The Kindle 3 has a LOT of faults. Obviously all the people who wrote such glowing reviews of it didn't know any better.