After listing my Kindle complaints, it’s only fair that I talk about cool things that I found out about the Kindle.

  • Whispernet, which delivers your purchases over wifi anywhere you are in the world (supposedly). It’s like buying a song from iTunes and then having it magically on your iPod.
  • It is a great form factor for reading Manga! I’m not a Manga fan though so I might not use this to full potential. It’s not so good for comic books because of the b+w screen though.
  • The newsfeed integration provided by Calibre is amazing. If you try the NY Times recipe, it actually looks like the newspaper. And it’s free! I would use it except there ends up being too much content to read every day.
  • Going travelling with your Kindle? Download a guide book onto it. No more lugging around heavy books across Europe. Although in practice it doesn’t work as well because most electronic guidebooks are in PDF and that doesn’t transfer well to the Kindle (the table contents aren’t translated properly which makes it pretty useless).
  • It displays Chinese (too bad I can’t read Chinese). Kind of. I tried loading Ming Pao via Calibre, and while it pushed all the articles down, the section headings are not legible. The articles look fine in Chinese though.