Kindle users react to their new DX's

Amazon forum users report on their new DX's.

  This was so much more interesting to me than reading some of the journalist reviews.

  Here's a smattering of them:

Greg: "It's ginormous. It's like a mutant K2! How am I supposed to carry this monstrous gadget around?"

Brent (who began the thread): "...When the progress bar completed, the Kindle automatically loaded the User's Guide....I'm blown away at this presentation. I feel shepherded along by the device"

Gracie: "Like Brent, I have half a charge too. The text is significantly darker and easier to read. It's super big and wicked cool."

Brent: "If I were a leftie, I'd have *fewer* problems using the DX than using a K2...[after turning it upside down].  On the other hand, the DX can be gripped just like a regular book; you can hold it anywhere on that left-hand side (much like you would a paper book). Heck, I'm beginning to believe the DX better replicates the paper reading experience than any other Kindle so far.

Brent: "The biggest font size is MASSIVE. Larger than any large-print book I've ever seen. I don't think that's going to be a problem for folks, unless they're legally blind."
  "I have seen the future of manga, and it is Kindle. Just loaded a manga on here, and it looks great. I can foresee buying a *lot* of B&W comics for the Kindle.

[WEB BROWSING]
  "The keyboard is...weird. The keys feel mushy, and are very tightly spaced. It's not quite as easy to type on than on the Kindle 2 or Kindle 1."

  "The screen refreshes a little faster when typing, I think."

  "Man. Switch the DX to landscape mode and browse the web...and the experience is slick. Feels like a netbook. It just works.

  And when you press the menu button in landscape, sure enough the menu appears as expected on the right (as you look at it).

[ Andrys speaking here re Twitter: we can tweet from our K2's too. ]

[PDFs]
  Still Brent: "PDFs look grand.
  I flipped to a page that has a two-column layout, three tables, headers, quite a bit of fairly small text in two different fonts (one section of text is on a light background, too), and a large image.  It all looks great. Perfectly readable."

  [ Three people received their DX's on that thread. ]

  Brent still: "PDF page flips sometimes take quite a bit of time. Most page flips seem to take 3-5 seconds, though sometimes it's faster than that.

  "Interestingly, page flips are MUCH faster in landscape mode. Less than a second, no matter how many pages I go through.

  "Search appears to work fine on PDFs, but is very slow. Impressively, however, it will highlight the found term on the page."

  "Text-to-speech definitely doesn't work on PDFs."

Poppy: "As a leftie ... Looks like I can read in lansdscape mode and the button will be on the bottom - easy enough to find the toggle with a finger of my free hand and flick it, or to hit the "next page" button."

Jeffrey "I downloaded a newspaper and the photographs are very clear and easy to see. They are lighter than in the K2 "

Brent "for poorly-scanned PDFs, the DX is a poor choice for reading them. But then, that's hardly the DX's fault. ... I have some trouble reading it on my laptop, much less on the DX."

Brent: "Dictionary workup doesn't work in PDFs, since you can't select text while in a PDF. The 5-way controller does nothing while I'm reading a PDF file."

Poppy: "I used the toggle and followed the simple instructions, and voila, my newspaper and magazine subscriptions were successfully transferred to the DX!! Very cool!!!"

Greg: "So it sounds like if you can convert PDFs to a readable Kindle file, that's the way to go since you will have annotations, highlighting, font scaling, and TTS. If it's a complex PDF with images, columns, graphs and so forth, it's better to let the DX read them natively."

Brent: "...Indeed, the larger size of the device makes it a little easier to grab, for me, and I like the clean left and top edges more and more. Just makes it easier to grab."

ChuckC: "A note on PDFs. I had a Computer Programming book that is on a PDF. on the Kindle2 I had used Amazon's conversion process. It had converted it, but it was more of a text file, meaning some of the large fonts were normal size, and it just looked kind of bad. Now on the DX, since it reads PDF natively, the PDF for this computer book is PERFECT!  As Brent mentioned, the page numbers are awesome. Since you can not click the table of contents like on a Kindle book, you can at least look at the table of contents and then type the page number in..."

Brent: [ Here are Brent's photos of unboxing and how his PDFs look on the device.]

Massage student: "tried the document you listed. It looks the same on the DX as it does on my PC. BUT remember, you don't have the ability to click on "links" in a PDF document... you can "GO To" a page and you can search the document."

 That's it for the first thread of user reactions I saw.  Soon, they'll be all over the forums, I imagine.

Remember that you can read the rest of the responses and much more detailed information by monitoring the forum thread, in which a lot of questions are being answered by those having the DX in hand.

UPDATE: 6/11 - 10:28 PM
Jef, of JefTek has another very good series of photographs of unboxing his DX and showing what the DX is like with PDFs and with the web-browser on this considerably wider screen when it's tilted sideways.  He shows how you can change the margins to have a narrower column to read across and shows what a web page looks like horizontally when browsing on this device.