The Indian Kindle!

The Kindle (from Amazon) is available worldwide, but is too expensive when shipped to India. On the top of it is English only (for the moment).

Now an Indian company (http://www.infibeam.com/) have come up with an Indian clone for Kindle and its called the Pi. So much so that the site also looks heavily inspired by amazon.com ... I did have wished that they would have been a bit creative here!

The plus point with this device is that it supports Sanskrit, Hindi and most of other official languages, which is missing in Kindle. The only truly missing point is wireless, the thing that makes kindle successful. To ignore it wont do good in long run, I think. Also the ability to make notes on kindle, along with the dictionary are two great reading aids, which I think would be completely missing in Pi.

The price of 10K is also too high, I think. The device should be below 5K to be popular in India. Some features like an SD card reader is actually not very useful, it should simply be removed and the cost saved.

Overall, I think it is interesting to see some thing like this come up in India. I think after the Simputer, this is the first IT hardware product made in India, and made for Indians. The Simputer was quite an innovation, which is missing to a large extent in Pi. Even then, kudos to Vishal Mehta and team for kick starting this. I hope he can open up the device for 3rd party programming too, possibly release an SDK along the lines of Amazon Kindle?

(Note: Pi is available for pre-order from http://www.infibeam.com/Pi)

Tired of reading articles with obvious errors

http://in.news.yahoo.com/32/20091028/1065/ttc-rekindling-the-market.html

An article in an Indian media reporting about Amazon's Kindle. Full of technical errors. Do the people who write such articles really know what they are writing about? Or is it just cut-copy-paste?! I wonder.

kindle update

Amazon updated Kindle firmware for PDF support the other day (and other improvements, like enhanced battery life). It should have been installed by now on your kindle if you had the wireless switched on. You can manually install the update from here (http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200324680)

With this you can read PDF natively on kindle, however I found few caveats:
- You can't change the text size in a PDF document as you can do with default kindle format.
- You can change the orientation though, which is good.
- The PDF loading is slower than the native kindle format.
- The text brightness is not as good as with documents in native kindle format.

Still exploring... but the PDF support is actually very beneficial. Hope Amazon can improve it with future updates.

Kindled !

I actually never planned this, but I always liked the idea of Amazon kindle. So when Amazon said they were releasing kindle to the rest of (US), I simply went ahead and ordered one for me.

And then it landed in my office yesterday, since then, have been lugging around with it ;-) So far liking it, quite a lot.

The reading experience is fantastic, the connectivity (well have been to a lot of places around ACT since I got it) is quite good, if not fast. I can access Wikipedia for free (with images), which is fantastic. Listen to MP3 while reading a book (wow, is a bliss). I can easily convert my PDFs to Kindle format, but only text and pictures convert correctly, not (vector) diagrams. I have not used the Amazon stores yet, but will be checking this out for some good books. I am not sure of how much I do have to pay for it though vs. buying a paper back.

And finally, that 20$ rebate was quite a surprise (but well should thank those Nook guys ;-)).

Next, I am waiting for Windows 7 (well for my copy to come), and hopefully some one releases a good (read with a real GPU), lightweight convertible tablet with multitouch :-)