I won't be buying the new Kindle DX, because I like that my Kindle 2 is small enough to fit into my backpack for traveling, but it does look interesting. If you haven't heard, Amazon surprised people this week with another new Kindle that has a screen that is "two and a half" times bigger than the Kindle 2. It also auto-rotates when you turn it on it's side, can handle PDFs and it holds up to 3,500 books. Some people are saying this device will save the newspaper industry, but I'm not believing that as long as they still think of themselves as the newsPAPER industry. Amazon announced new deals with the New York Times and the Washington post and also partnerships with several universities and textbook publishers so that students can get their textbooks on the Kindle DX.
Yesterday I sat outside at lunch and read. The sun was so bright that I was practicly blinded, but my kindle was perfectly readable. When a new email arrived on my phone, I pulled it out to check it and was struck by how un-readable my phone display was in the sunlight compared to the Kindle. In the photo below, the phone display is on, but impossible to read in the direct Colorado sunlight.
(Click the photo for a closer look)
I was also going to link to a photo I saw yesterday of the new Kindle DX that showed an instrument approach plate on it. Pilots carry big books of loose-leaf paper around with them with diagrams of how they are expected to fly instrument approaches. Every month they get updates that they are then expected to file (quickly and correctly) into their spiral bound notebooks. Occasionally they put one in the wrong place and then "discover" a new antenna or other structure has appeared near the airport. The picture seems to have disappeared – maybe the idea of depending on technology in the cockpit scared to many people. That's a joke – unless you fly a Piper Cub, you probably are already depending on a whole lot of technology in the cockpit.
