Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Hands on:Kindle for Android prototype - a report by ArsTechnica

This is an UPDATE to the blog article on the Kindle for Android app that is coming this summer.

Ars Technica's Ryan Paul reports on a hands-on demo on the prototype, which Amazon brought to Google I/O. As mentioned earlier, it has the usual Kindle app features, including syncing across all supported devices.
' Screen readability is good and offers a solid reading experience. Users can select from several different font sizes and background colors. Options include a sepia mode and a white-on-black mode for night reading. The application user interface has a brightness adjustment slider, but it wasn't yet functional in the prototype that I tested.

The application lacks a built-in bookstore, but it can automatically sync content that the user has purchased. To add a book from the device itself, the user visits Amazon's website, purchases a book, and then uses the reader application's synchronization feature to pull it down onto the device.
  When the user deletes a book from the device in order to free up storage space, it is still accessible from an "archive" menu which can be used to re-download the content. '
He notes that if you want to read free e-books from places like Project Gutenberg's site, you'll still need a separate third-party reader application like FBReader or Aldiko. Ryan adds:

' I often read e-books on my cell phone when I travel.  I recently managed to get through two William Gibson novels during the flights to and from the Ubuntu Developer Summit that took place earlier this month in Brussels.  Getting e-books on my phone today is often a bit of a chore.  The ability to buy books over the air and have them available and fully synced on all of my devices will be a welcome addition to the Android platform. '


 See the ongoing Guide to finding Free or Low-Cost Kindle books and Sources
   Check often:  Latest temporarily free non-classics or late-listed temporarily free nonclassics. Below are ways to Share this post if you'd like others to see it.
-- The Send to Kindle button works well only on Firefox currently.

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