Amazon Kindle – personal review

I’ve bought Amazon Kindle about a month ago, so it is about time to write some review. Generally I am very satisfied with it. I don’t think I should  repeat all the positive reviews available on the Net, it would be quite unnecessary. So just to sum it up: Buying books to Kindle from Amazon with it’s “one-click” feature is awesome and very convenient. In less then five minutes I had the book in my Kindle.  Then I plugged in my headphones, turned on the “text to speech” function, put my baby in the pram and started walking. As for me this “text to speech” is a killer feature. It really saves my time.  I can listen to books I intended to read but did not have time to do so.

That’s what I like. Let’s talk now about the features I miss. First of all: text-to-speech is good enough but still far from perfect. The voice doesn’t make a pause when it should, like i.e. at the end of a paragraph or headline. It reads a book as it were one big chunk of text. It makes correct pause at the end of a sentence, it even pronounce questions as questions, but it just can’t make a pause between paragraphs. I don’t think it would be that difficult to program. I hope Amazon will fix in the next version of firmware.

Another “not-a-bug-but-a-feature” is that one can’t install other language or font or screen saver without having to jailbreak Kindle. There is a lot of people wanting to have images of living animals or other funny stuff  instead of long dead authors (nothing against them thought) or install their local language. Not everyone speaks English, there is about 6000 languages in the world :).

Nice-to-have feature

Remote control. It would be great to have it. When I walk and listen to Kindle I sometimes wish to pause it, return to previous paragraph or skip one. It is not possible at all. What I wish is to have some kind of remote control on headphones. Would it be nice? But I guess that will never be implemented… 🙁