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Kindle: iPhone App Review

I have a confession to make: I am a reader. Hardcover, softcover, mystery, technical manual, horror, sci-fi. If it has words, arranged into sentences, I want to read it. But I live in a rural area, so there aren’t alot of good bookstores, and although I work in a city with several big name book stores, as a single father, there just isn’t alot of time to go sift through shelves to find something interesting after work. Amazon has just about everything, but I am truly impatient, and hate waiting for things to arrive. To that end, last summer I bought a Kindle.

If you are one of the people fortunate enough to have a Kindle, you know what I am about to say: the Kindle is the single greatest device I have ever used. I know I am an iPhone app reviewer, but when I say the Kindle is better, I mean it.

The ability to download a book, for very little money, and read it almost immediately, on that e-paper screen, is nothing short of sublime. And the battery life is everything we all wish the iPhone’s could be. But the device does have some downsides. It is a tad ugly, there aren’t very many accessories, and turning the page takes a little while. Less than a second, but still, you notice it. My personal annoyance is that the Kindle isn’t pocket sized, so carrying it around isn’t as convenient as carrying around my phone.

Until now. Amazon has released the Kindle app for the iPhone, and now the world is beautiful again. Although there are some places where the functionality doesn’t match up, the Kindle app for the iPhone is really the mobile phone ebook reader we have all been waiting for.

When you open it up, you are greeted by a list of books you have downloaded onto the device, and an archive, where all of the books you own are downloaded from. You, unfortunately, cannot purchase books from inside the app, like you can on a regular Kindle, but honestly, the Safari browser on your iPhone or iPod Touch is better, anyway. Once you have bought a book and downloaded it, reading is as simple as swiping the screen to change the page, and tapping the screen to bring up the menu. Your location is saved, and automatically synced to your Amazon account, so the next time you open the book in either your iPhone, or on your actual Kindle, it will open to that location.

There is also a button to take you instantly to the furthest read page. There are five different font sizes, although only three of them seem useful to me, and links for your book marks, notes, and all of the important parts of a book, like the table of contents, or the first page of the actual story.

There is some stripped functionality, though. The largest example is that on my Kindle, I can look up words that I am not sure of. On the iPhone, not so much. I am guessing that they didn’t include the dictionary because it would increase the size of the app by a huge amount, but I still would like it as an option. And, lastly, I subscribe to a few magazines with my Kindle, and they don’t seem to sync to my iPhone. To me, these are small issues, and for an initial release, this app is just heads and shoulders above the competition.

[Thanks: http://www.iphoneworld.ca]

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