It’s Here!</I?

My Kindle 2 arrived today, actually this evening after I had given up hope of it arriving today. It was supposed to arrive tomorrow but the Kindle Boards were all agog over the fact that Amazon was shipping one day early. Well, around 6 pm I was lying on the bed reading and I heard the dog upstairs bark. Then I heard the outer kitchen door slam and I knew immediately what it was. The UPS man puts stuff between the two doors at the back of the house. Fred was in the kitchen and he retrieved it and brought it to me.

It is absolutely beautiful! Kindle 1 is boxy-looking; this Kindle is sleek and thin. It actually looks like a rather large IPod! The screen is the same size as the original Kindle but looks a little smaller because this Kindle is a bit longer than the original. And it is VERY thin. Instead of having a scroll and click wheel, it has a five-point tiny little joystick! It came with instructions already in it but I confess I jumped in and tried things and have got a lot of it sorted out already. Well, as yet I haven’t sorted out how to delete samples but I will get there. I actually have the directions saved as a document on my IMac so I can print that out tomorrow and look things up.

Things I Like a lot.

• The text is clearer and sharper.
• The pictures are VERY sharp and much easier to see.
• In Kindle 1, I could click on the outside edge of a button and it was easy to move. Of course this meant that pages got turned inadvertently quite often. In this Kindle, one has to click on the inner edge of the button and so far I haven’t accidentally turned a page at all.

Things that are very different:

• To turn on the whispernet in Kindle 1, one had to manipulate a button on the back of the Kindle. With this one, the on/off button is at the top. It is also the button one uses to put the Kindle to sleep whereas in Kindle 1, one held down the Alt and the Aa {font sizing} buttons together.
• I like the fact that now the dictionary will give the definition of one word. In the other version, the dictionary would give the definition of all the words on the line.
• This Kindle’s battery can be juiced up either by plugging it into a wall socket or by attaching it to a USB slot. The first kindle could only be charged though a wall socket. There was a separate USB cord with it for transferring books one did not buy through Amazon but it was not possible to charge the battery this way. This means, of course, only one cord to keep up with instead of two.

Tomorrow I will play with the text-to-speech ability.

"… A human activity having for its purpose the transmission of the highest and best feelings to which men have risen." (on the purpose of art).

Leo Tolstoy

"Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going."

Jim Rohn

"Enjoyment is not a goal; it is a feeling that accompanies important ongoing activity."

Paul Goodman