Hey guys, John Rettinger here. I’m going to give you a walk through of the software of the Amazon Kindle two. Hope you enjoy.
All right guys, so here is the Kindle powered off, we’ll go ahead and turn it on. Slide the switch on top, takes a second and it blinks a few times and lights up.
So when you are getting treated with getting the Kindle on, when you turn the Kindle is what’s called the Kindle home screen. This list all of your content that you have here and you can navigate by that little black bar that follows it. You can see right there To fat to fish, Kindle two users guide, comes standard in it, the Oxford dictionary and the archived items.
It’ll make you want to read and say, I want to read the Kindle two user’s guide. I just use this little joy stick down here push it in, it loads, and opens right up and it’ll open right up to where you last where, which actually is a very cool thing so you can – your reading a book close it and go open a magazine, come to your book, it would right on the same page your were addition to right were you run your magazine. It actually remembers where you’re at which is a very nice feature.
Let’s go back to the home screen, let me show what your options are here at the home screen. There’s always something you can do with the Kindle. And for those you there watching this for the first time and don’t know what the Kindle is, it prophases software by saying, it’s an e-book reader, it another way to read books, magazines, blogs, and such on in another device.
So let me go ahead and show you this, so we’ll go ahead and hit the menu button and this gives you a full list of menus. Right here is where you turn you wireless off. On Kindle one there was a switch for that but now its right here. You’ve got shop on Kindle store that I’ll show you in a moment. Search, you can actually search for any content that you have on your Kindle, words or topics. Settings, not much in a way of settings really, just change your email address, registration of the Kindle and that’s about it. Experimental, experimental actually where some of the stuff is, let me show you that first.
You’ve got a basic web browser, play mp3s and text and speech. So this does have sprints e-video 3G connectivity here its how it downloads books, again, ill show you that in a moment. So this takes advantage of that by using the web, so you can view the web here. I’m going to open it up, it open up a pretty basic browser, here are some sites that have already been formatted for Kindle. We’ll look in Wikipedia, I’ll show you guys what that looks like real quickly. So its actually a very quick load, it’s a very usable browser for in a pinch and you’ve got your URL bar right up there, you can type in whatever you’d like using the on screen keyboard on the Kindle and here we go, you’ve got Wikipedia right in your finger tips. So that’s the browser.
And it does have a very rudimentary mp3 player on here, I don’t have mp3s but if I did, it would play. So you could enter your URL, go to top, you can set some bookmarks in there, some general settings here for the browser, but I'm going to go ahead and close so I can get to the other good stuff. I’m not making this a 30 minute long video.
So we’ll go ahead and go back to home screen. One of the big things that the Kindle has the ability to wirelessly download all of your content. So you never actually ever have to connect this to a computer, your not attached to a computer to get your content, you can download everything right here in the Kindle. Let me show you what that looks like. We go and hit menu, well go shop in Kindle store, connects the network, and it pulls up a full list of Kindle options. This is kind of the store home screen here, it recommends some books for you, based on some other stuff you’ve purchased. You can navigate by books, new papers, magazines, blogs, national best sellers, Kindle to sellers, news and noteworthy books. Let’s got to Kindle top sellers here and all the books I've searched for I haven’t thought of one book that is in not Kindle format. Something to keep in my mind that really everything you want will be here.
The first book that’s in Kindle top seller is the book called Assassin’s Apprentice. Lets say I want to download Assassin’s Apprentice so I’ll go ahead and hit the middle button, the five way joy stick right there, loads up and here you’re greeted with an inscription of the book, the options to buy it, custom reviews, you can kid of scroll down and keep reading all the custom reviews which is actually very handy, you can more and load up more review, and you can really get a sense of what people thought of the book.
Let’s go back to Royal assassins, what other really nice thing that the Kindle have is the ability to try a sample, think of it like iTunes, when you got to the iTunes store, you can play 30 seconds of a movie, this will give you the first chapter of a book. You can really get a chance to whether you like it or not.
Let me go ahead and download a sample and you can see how quickly how this one chapter downloads and compare that to a full book. Try a sample and you buy anything here using Amazon on click it’s just set it up on mine and you are good. Right now its resending you a free sample automatically appearing on your home screen. We’ll go to home we’ll see how long it takes for it to show up. Actually, it’s very quick, I downloaded a full book in just under 60 seconds. Definitely keep that in mind. Your probably looking anywhere from a minute to a minute and a half for a full book depending on your network connection. And there it is, Royal Assassins, it says sample right next to it. So I’ll open that up and there’s the book.
So as long as we’re in here on text, let me go ahead and give you guys a software overview. Where your options are when you are reading a book. So this is a gray scale screen, its actually I believe a 16 shades of gray, and the reason its gray and its not black lit is to make it easier on the eyes, just like reading a regular book, so here I have an example, here’s a brief history of time by Stephen Hocking. So if you look at this here, it’s just standard text, black and white, and its just similar to the way things look on the Kindle. So that’s does seems to be the rationale behind that.
So you're here, depending on your age, your eye sight, you have the option to set the font whatever you choose, so right there at the bottom. There is a font button, you go ahead and click that, move this back up and you write a whole different bunch of font sizes here, you can kind of pick what you like the best.
You can go all the way up to the biggest, you can see how big that gets and different sizes in between. I found the middle font to be quite good for me, now you also know that right below there it says text to speech, Kindle also has a text to speech, meaning it’ll read the book to you.
Don’t expect audio book functionality, its not going to sound like an author’s eloquent voice its very robotic, and you can choose the speech rate whether it’s slower, the default of faster, you can choose whether it’s a male or female. So let me show you guys what this sounds like.
So to turn that on, go to menu and now we’ll start text to speech. Let’s go ahead and turn that off. So you get a sense of what the text to speech sounds like, it sounds really robotic and definitely qualifies in existing experimental feature, I don’t think I would ever use it, even if I was in a car but if that, if that thing is usable to you, you can use the external speakers on the back of the device of you can plug in a head phone using the 3.5 mm headset jack.
When you want to turn you page, you’ve got two options, you can either hit the next button on the left, next button on the right, and when you hit that, you’ll see a flash and the page appears.
Now another cool thing about the Kindle is the battery is being used when it’s changing what’s on the screen. So right now, it is not using a single cent of battery to display the content, obviously it’s using some to connect to the 3G radio, but if you turn the radio off and you’re just reading a page, you’re not using any battery life. Meaning battery life on this device is fantastic, I’ve been reading pretty much straight since I got it on Monday and as you guys can see, I still almost have full battery life. Which is really impressive and that’s even keeping the 3G radio on. It’s definitely something to keep in mind as you guys start to use the device.
I’ll go ahead and go back to the home screen, and that’s about it guys, just a real quick software overview of the Kindle and how it works, I’ve really enjoyed using it, it’s been really easy on the eyes so far. I’m going to save the rest of those comments for a full review coming and stay tuned for view videos on Kindle tricks and tips and the final review video.
And on thing I did want to bring up is there is a Kindle software for the iPhone and the iPod touch, and people have been asking me, I've given a lot of questions, why did I get a Kindle when I can just read a book on the iPhone. So let me tell you guys something interesting here, I cannot read that much on the iPhone, it hurts my eyes for a while, its great for reading an email or reading a blog but its come time to reading full book, it really is a straight on the eyes. So its compliment for the Kindle, there’s certainly not a replacement for it in my mind. And even screen size alone is quite different. You know the screen cuts off right there are there is a lot more room and this really looks like a native page. And this has some glare and reflective ness that does going to hurt my eyes.
Anyway guys, I hope you enjoyed this software overview of the Kindle two. For exclusive content follow me on Twitter, twitter.com\john4lakers.
I will see you guys in the next video, bye-bye.
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