Hi welcome to the Eev blog an Electronics Engineering Video blog of interest to anyone involved in electronics design. I'm your host Dave Jones Hi it's product review time again, but I got something a little bit different for you today. I've got the Brin SP and new just released Amazon Kindle Ebook Reader This is the third generation the Kindle 3 6-in device. Let's check it out now.

I' just like to say up front that this is the first time I've actually owned and used an ebook reader. It's the first time I've used the Kindle I haven't used the previous version so I don't know how it Compares but uh I thought I'd share my experiences with it as a firsttime user. Let's take a look now. the reason I haven't thought about getting an ebook readed before is because, well, they were a bit Niche they were very expensive, you know, $3 $400 plus something like that and well, they didn't have a spectacular battery life I thought but then this new this new generation 3 Kindle or the Kindle 3.

It's not actually called the Kindle 3 but I think that's what everyone's going to be calling it. the Kindle 3 Uh, they advertised it Amazon advertised it for $139 for this new model for WiFi only or $189 for the Uh WiFi plus 3G GSM model. And at that price, it was too good to pass up. But the other thing which really sold on this was that fact that it had a 1 month claim battery life H one month.

Awesome. That's what I'm talking about when you want a product like an ebook reader. Now as you might know, I'm not normally a fan of unboxings so I'm not going to do the T unboxing. but I thought the box was worth mentioning.

This is the box that was actually shipped in. There was no outter box at all. Um, and they actually claim um, certified frustration free packaging There it is assembled in China Of course. well what do we expect? but uh.

but I thought this was really neat. There was no wasted packaging at all shipped directly. DHL It's got one rip. uh, you know one of those rip tags along there and you open it up and Tada there's your Kindle Oh, look at it and the amazing thing is you open the box and the screen is already on because it uses an eink display which draws no power.

You know this is the first time I've ever seen this eink display and I've got to tell you I am absolutely Gob smacked I'm blowing away. It's just that incredible. You think it's got one of those you know fake uh screen um things which you get on Pro you know which you get on actual products and you peel it off. you know, like that, but it's not.

that's the actual, that's the actual display and what else you get in there. Um, you get a uh, recycled. Um, it looks like it's uses recycled. Looks like it all uses recycled materials.

You get a starter guide you get as a micro um uh, micro USB cable with it and that allows you to do PC connection and charging as well. but that's all you get. Beautiful simplistic packaging I Love it. Okay, now let's take a look at the unit.

Uh, overall, this is the 6-in model. It also comes in a D 9in DX model. and if you compare it with a standard, uh, standard size paperback novel here, this is George Smoot's wrinkles in time. It's it's not.

You know, it's pretty on par with the size of that, but obviously much much thinner. Now it feels like a a really, really well-designed good quality unit. I'm having a hard time bending that I'm sure I could if I uh, tried, but um, yeah, it feels really solid. It's got a nice, um, sort of like a almost a rubber feel back on it and that stops IT that stops IT sliding around too much, which is which is actually quite a nice design aspect.

It feels really high quality and quite rugged, and the screen, um, feels like it's fairly well, fairly well protected. I'm not sure what the actual covering is on that, but you can get the feel that you can just grab it like that and toss it around and you're not really going to have any problems. I'm not going to try and figure out where the stress point is on the screen and damage it, but you can certainly give it a few bangs and it's no problem at all. Now let's check out the keyboard down here.

It's got a quiry keyboard. Um, now I'm not a big fan of these cursor keys. This is one of my gripes with the unit: if you, um, press these cursor buttons with your thumb I find that I I tend to hit that Center enter button. um that Center select button quite often, but uh, if I use my fingers, it's not a problem.

Um, generally. but yeah, I've hit that that Center one a few times accidentally. Really a bit annoying, but um, yeah, you take the good with the bad. Apart from that, the keyboard's not too bad I Find it quite well laid out and it works well.

Now to flip: uh, page forward and page back. They got two buttons here and two buttons here. Now, as you can see, the larger one is Page forward because they've put a bit of thought into it and they thought, well, most people want to, uh, go forward through a book so it will make that uh key bigger than the back button and and they've got duplicate ones left and right-handed so it doesn't actually discriminate. But um, I'm still trying to train myself to use it I Still kind of start, my mind just thinks, well, this one's forward and this one over here is back.

So I've got to train myself to think it's one-handed operation, only forward back like that so it's a bit confusing. but um I guess that comes through training now. let's take a look at the end on it here. Now we got volume control here Plus plus minus standard 3.5 mm um audio headphone jack.

There's a microphone Port right there which doesn't work on this model, but um I Guess any apps in the future can use a microphone. it's got a micro AB uh USB connector I Was a bit disappointed by that I was expecting a mini B um I Don't particularly like the Ab that much, although it is more reliable. It's designed for higher insertions and it's the latest technology. so at least that's good.

And the slide power switch here I Really like because check out the nice diffuse LED It's not very bright green and it lights up on both sides. Green tells you that the power is good and orange during charging and things like that. and on the back here. um, we've got uh, these, uh, dual speakers here and they're actually quite high quality.

I'm actually surprised at the quality of the sound I'm getting out of this. We'll test that later. but overall, it's a really nice unit. There's Mark Twain on the front, it's actually turned off.

You see it says uh, slide and release the power switch to wake Um, that's what you can do with this E in display and that that image changes about once every 10 minutes or something like that. I'm not sure if you can customize it, but it goes through a whole bunch of historical figures and it's really quite nice. So that's the 6-in Kindle in a nutshell, and um, on the back here are the speakers. The speakers are actually work very well.

I'm quite surprised at the Quality um of the audio that comes out two mysterious looking uh holes on the side. Here, they're not on the other side, they're only on the left hand side and I don't know what they are I haven't sort of figured it out yet and I haven't read anything about it, but uh, obviously they're for something. And of course, the big thing is, how much does it weigh? Well, Here you go: 234 G Let's compare it with the same size paperback novel. pretty typical 310.

There you go, weighs less than George Smoo's wrinkles in time. Okay, now let's uh, switch the unit on here. just slide the power switch like that and bingo. It automatically defaults to where you left off, which is really quite nice.

and you get a welcome message when you open the box. the uh Kindle is already um, if you buy it through Amazon it's already registered in your account name so you know dear David it already knows who I am and it's already registered. Now the main button down here is the home button and that will take you to list all of the books you've put in there. I've put some in.

there's categories and all sorts of things. Um, there's uh, it shows. The battery gauge up here is really quite. uh, nice.

and it shows the status of the Wi-Fi um in this case or the Wi-Fi and the GSM is turned off and this is the name of my Kindle I've changed it. it was David's Kindle but I changed it to Eev blog and uh, I'll try and give you some idea of the quality of the display Now really really is quite difficult to get a good closeup of just how magnificently rendered this display is. um I'm I'm under Fluro lights here in the lab, so it's not the best, but it does have a true 180 uh, sperical field of view and it's just. it's just remarkable.

It's absolutely incredible to look at. It is really just like paper. It's a nice sort of matte sort of white. It's it's not quite.

it's it's not a bright white background, but it it's lovely to look at, lovely to read, easy on the eyes. It's just. it really is incredible and you really cannot see the pixels in there. Um, it's just amazing.

It's got 16 Shades of Gray uh but that's is plenty for Um images and things like that. Very nice high quality display and if you turn the page you can see it go black for half a second. So that's um, that's the eink display. Actually refreshing the whole thing, but you can go through reasonably quickly.

It doesn't really slow you down. Um, the uh, page forward and page back really is quite nice. I Like it now in normal use. it's quoted as a one month battery life if you turn the uh Wi-Fi and the 3G GSM off, but that's easy from virtually anywhere.

You just hit the menu button doesn't matter where you are and there's a turn Wireless um on? Well, in this case, let turn it on and you switch it on and uh, bingo there it is. It's actually on. now. it's got, uh, now it's got the wireless uh, signal up there.

It hasn't actually there it is. It's got the Wi-Fi so that's how long it took to actually uh, lock into the Wi-Fi But you can just switch it off and that will get you your one month battery life. If you have Wi-Fi switched on, you get about 3 weeks, which is still very impressive. and you'll also notice it does actually have a clock as well, which is really nice.

If you're in bed reading or you're somewhere else, it's good to have a clock there pop up on the menu. now. One fantastic thing about this, if if you don't like the size or the uh density of the text used in your particular ebook, you just press the alpha um button down here. I'm going to call it the alpha button I don't know what it's actually called and you can actually scroll through, use the cursor keys and scroll through different size fonts and it changes it in real time.

Look at that. Unbelievable. that's that's really quite nice. and then you can actually change the type face from regular to condensed and uh, sand serif.

There you go. and then you can actually tailor it to uh to suit your particular requirements. Line spacing small, medium, large, quite nice so you can fit as little or as much uh, words, uh per line and it updates that in real time, which is really quite neat. I'm not sure why you would want to waste all that space there, but hey, you know if if you want to, no problem at all.

Um, and it's also got text to speech which we'll go into, but one of the features I really love is the screen rotation. You can just select that and Bingo! The screen is now reads like that Fantastic. I Love it and you can hold it like that or like that and it's actually I Quite like this orientation because it's um, as you read down, you press that button down there and it makes sense to sort of go down, but that one unfortunately doesn't take you back up. But as before, but yeah, that's you know, it's just really quite nice and quite usable in this um.

landscape format. I Love it. And in the landscape mode, everything switches around as well. So if you call up the menu, there it is.

It actually reformats the menu to fit in that orientation and it rotates the cursor Keys as well. Beautiful! Now because you can actually, uh, format the text on this thing any way you want Pages become a bit redundant with these things. so instead of page numbers, you've got a percentage bar down here of how much you've actually read. And these locations what are called locations.

There's 13,24 of them in this Harry Potter book, which seems a bit crazy, but you sort of get used to it and it does allow you to bookmark to a specific location and um, share locations between different people regardless of what size, font you have, what formatting, what orientation, and all that sort of stuff. So I guess there's method in the madness there. Now let's try the new experimental uh text to speech function which can read your book for you I Don't think it's going to do that well on Harry Potter Um, but let's give it a go. You hit the alpha button down here.

There is a hotkey to uh, turn this on as well, but let's go down to text the speech and turn it on. It takes a few seconds. There we go Voice Rising Together it wasn't me, it was a couple of dors, a couple of what's the Scott Wall of Dors said Harry Slowly and clearly two of them. and what the rdy hell are dementor they guard the wizard prison Es Kaban said in Patun there you go and if you press the alpha button again, um, you can actually turn, you can set the uh Speech rate and the speaking voice.

Let's try a female one. her Harry's brain real Mrs fig was one but an Funia how do you know that he asked her astonished. An Funia looked quite appalled with herself. She glanced at Unle Vernon in fearful apology.

Good thing is, you can switch it off and it still to you. And the good thing is is that that works for audio. The text to speech, the audio books, and the Mp3 mp3 player as well. He can switch it off seemed horribly flustered.

har was it still keeps reading it back on. Still goes. She usually put all her energies into pretending it didn't exist. There you go, it doesn't skip a beat.

I Love it. And because the display stays on when you switch it off, it's it. really takes some getting used to. It's a bit unusual.

You think, oh, you turn it on, the screen's lit up. oh it's still turned on, but it's not, so just something to watch out for. It does have an auto turnoff feature though, which is great. Okay, one of the new features of the Amazon Kindle is the new web browser.

Now let's check it out. Let's go into Men from the Home screen and this is one of my gripes. Look, you go down, it's in, it's under instead of being on the main menu here. okay, you think the web browser would be your main feature? It's not.

You got to go down to experimental menu down here. Why? That's just nuts and look, have a read of what they got here. We are working on these experimental prototypes. Do you find them useful? Should we continue working on them, We would love to hear what you think.

So please send your comments to Kindle Feedback Amazon.com or bloody hell Kindle Of course we want a web browser, an MP3 player and text to speech on our ebook. God That's a given. God Just put them as main applications on the main screen. I Don't get it.

Ah, unbelievable. Anyway, let's go into the launch browser and um, let's reload. I've already had the Amazon Uh.com site up here, but I'm using a Wi-Fi connection as you can see, um, not too many bars. It's uh, I'm out here in the lab a long way from my Um access point, but as you can see, it renders Pages beautifully now.

I've disabled uh the Wi-Fi connection I'm using the 3g connection as you can see now I can still surf Um, it looks like any website. Um, by default, I set the bookmark, it's Google Ireland Why I have no idea I'm not in Ireland Anyway, I'm going to check out the Ow.com small plug there which is my radio show and I'm going to load that up and let's give it a go. it's going to take us to. there's the progress bar.

Got a 3 G connection I've preloaded this page so it's a little bit quicker um than than before it. It looks like it has actually cached it, but as you can see, I can still I'm not using my Wi-Fi connection. it's the free 3g connection through Amazon um through yeah I So I don't know how much bandwidth you get if there's a limit per month or whatever. but it looks like you can surf No problems at all.

Any website. Beauty Now there is one thing with the browser. It's not completely flexible. It doesn't let you play uh, popup.

So if I highlight and select a link here which uh, tries to play an MP uh 3 um on my Ow website it says web browser could not open this link because opening multiple windows is not supported. So there you go. But still, as a basic browser, it actually works quite well. And one of the great things about the Kindle is that it reads steady PDF documents as well.

You just hook it up the computer, drag and drop them into the documents directory and look. It shows up a little PDF there a little PDF next to the document and this one's the Art of Electronics and I'm going to go into it and it's It's a PDF of the book The Art of electronics and as you can see it reads the um, it's got You know, a it's a huge, It's a massive book. It's over a thousand pages and uh, and there it is the complete um uh PDF document but you can view uh, data sheets or any any PDF you like. One of the other experimental features of the Kindle is the MP3 player and um, if you go to the experimental page here it is.

It tells you uh, play mp3s and uh, you can select it from here or you can simply hit the hot key from anywhere you can still be reading a book, you just hit Alt Spacebar and the contr and the audio quality is quite good. but the problem is the only controls you've got. There's no media player, um, you can't see what files are on there, you can't select albums, you can't do anything, All you can do is press alt Space bar to start and stop and um F to switch to the next song. It's just it's crazy.

You just can't do anything. but hey, at least it sounds good and it does uh, play well and if you're wondering how long it actually um uh lasts the battery. I've done a test on it and it lasts 24 hours continuous playing um on a fully charged battery, playing continuous into a set of headphones. There you go.

So I've done the test and that's what it does. and it also plays when you switch it off no problems at all so you can switch it off on and uh, you can be scrolling through documents, reading books, and at the same time listening to your um listen into music. Fantastic! Okay, so let's actually download a book from the Amazon store. Now let's go into the menu and we'll go shoing Kindle Store There we go.

I'm using the 3g connection. for some reason it's flipped it back around like this: I'm not to Portrait orientation. Not sure why. Anyway, 3g connection.

let's go into books here and uh, let's and it says you can just start typing to type a search. So I'm going to do something here. Uh, let's go for a good book. uh The God Delusion There we go.

Enter and let's give it a go. It's wirelessly connecting. it's 3G I've disabled the Wi-Fi It' probably be a bit quicker if we had uh WiFi so it's slowly getting there. There it is there it is.

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkin let's go in there and select that and it gives you. Um, if it can't find it, it gives you Alternatives and things like that. but uh, we'll go in there. It gives you this little scrolly icon up here like that, so it looks like it's taken its time with the old 3g connection.

But there it is and you can just buy it. um or and it tells you the list price. There it is. Uh, but it's got.

Try a sample. So let's try a sample and click. Okay, and once again, it's thinking, thinking, thinking and we are currently sending your free sample and automatically appear on your home screen when the download is complete. Well, it should pop up here with a message when it's actually complete and eventually it's taking its time.

But it does that in background you can actually go. Oh there it is. Items downloaded there you go. so you just press the home button down here and bingo it's look, it's popped up there.

It is the God delusion and it tells you it's a sample. There you go. So we'll go in there and we'll highlight that and we have our book. Fantastic.

There it is. Tada That's how simple it is to um, download a book from the Kindle Store Okay, let's plug it into the PC and see what We get the micro USB connector and we'll plug it in and Bingo There it is. If you want to, uh, read or shop on your Kindle while continue to charge. Uh, please keep it attached but eject the Kindle from your computer so as you can see it's um now orange showing orange.

That's charging but you can't do anything. You can't switch it on or off. You can't do a thing. Now it says, if we want to, um, continue to use it while it's charging on the PC then we eject it.

So let's go down here to the eject, safely remove and there it is. Eject Amazon Kindle and we hit that and and nothing. What? Epic fail. Oh, I mean there's something seriously wrong with that.

It's screwed. What a heap of crap. Um, now it works on my XP machine. but Windows 7 here doesn't? Um, it looks like it doesn't work at all.

There's definitely something buggy with Windows 7 there. or either that or I'm not ejecting it right? I Don't know. But yeah, go figure. Now as you can see once it's um, open, you can actually access the drive no problems at all.

and you can see the documents which are all in there like that. and uh, you can just drag and drop your PDF documents into documents. You can drag and drop your MP3s into music. Um, you can do them based on subdirectories, but as I said, you can't select them.

um, and uh, audible. I've got um, audio books in there as well. I've got MP3 audio books and they play just fine. I mentioned audio books and I've actually um, I've actually created created these categories.

Don't come up by standard. I've actually created a category and put my audio books in there I Won't show you that, but it's easy to do and you go into audio books and let's see that work. I've got the Last Man on the moon. Let's give that a try by Eugene Cernon, An excellent audio book spoken by Eugene Cernon himself and it's got play down here and there it is I Really didn't know him during our early years as Naval Aviates, but when we were both among the 14 astronauts announced in 19, 19, 63, Our Lives became link when all else fails I don't alphabetically CER then Chaffie.

Excellent. It works quite well the audio book player and as as with everything else off, Shivner at their place next and it continues to play. Excellent And you can go read PDFs or anything else or books while you're listening to your audio book. Excellent.

And now he was dead Now, while the screen is absolutely phenomenal, indoors were works brilliantly. Outdoors it works brilliantly. There's no glare, but how does it? Uh, you know how good as it to read in the bed at night while you're partner sleeping next to you? Well, I've got my little Mighty bright um uh light and I'm going to give it a try. Okay So let's give the light a go, shall we? I'll switch the lights off and whoa, it's it's.

really hard to show up here. it's going to take some time to adjust. but TR Trust me, that is very. That is quite readable.

But the problem is is the bright spot in the middle here. and if you put the light in the middle as you traditionally as as I do for my paper book, it's just no good. You've really got to put it off to one side like that and sort of, um, have it like that and light up the text. It's but trust me I can read that actually quite well.

So it does work. and there you go. If I do the same thing with the book, as you can see, you don't get that bright reflective spot in the middle of course. um, you You know it's nice and diffused and not a problem with the paper, but the Uh E in display is a bit reflective, but still if you put it to one side it, it still works fairly well.

now. as for technical specs, well it's got a free scale arm processor in it. uh which you could probably repurpose. Anyone wants to uh uh, do some hacking on the thing.

although the manual says you're not allowed to screw that hack away guys. Um, and uh, it's um, there's going to be apps for it as well. Uh Amazon have released an SDK as well. Um, so that you know.

So look out for um Kindle apps but it's got uh 4 gig of memory. Uh, only 3 gig is usable. Not that great. It's got an 800 by 600 screen which is about 150 or 160 pixels per inch.

but it looks, oh, it's pornographic. It it. it really is pornographic. It's phenomenal.

Um, the screen is just absolutely amazing. but yeah, uh. technical specs wise, it's pretty good. It's got a lithium ion battery I think it's about 1,700 Mah hour capacity.

Um, but yeah, a one month battery life is the real killer. Even if you turn Wi-Fi on, it's still 3 weeks battery life. Um I think that drops down to about a week if it's GSM as well or something like that. But God Phenomenal.

And the specs say it's got an operational range of 0 to 35. C Well I got my thermal chamber here. let's try it out. Okay, first up here, we need a baseline of the display and how well it operates.

So I've got a book here, load it up, and let's check it out. It's not bad at all. This is, um, about 17 C here in the lab, so we will, um, uh, whack it in the thermal oven, take it down to uh, as close to 0 as we can get it, and see if the update uh rate or the uh, the refresh rate of the Uh screen is affected by temperature. Let's give it a go.

Okay, I've set it for 2 C I'm going to whack it in the thermal oven and uh, leave it for a while, soak down to temperature and let's see if it still survives. Okay, it's been in there for a while. it's soaked down to about 3 C and let's check it out. Woohoo! Nice and chilly here we go.

Switch on. still working wa that seems a bit slow. Oh, check it out I think that's slower I think that's definitely slower. Okay, here we go.

This is the book after 2 C I think that's pretty I think that's a bit slower. Okay, it's up to 35 now. it's had time to soak and let's try it out. Here we go.

Is that faster? Yeah, it seems I Think it seems quicker than before. We'll just do a closeup of the 35 C Certainly quicker now. the Kindle comes standard with uh 4 GB of memory which sounds doesn't sound like much these days, and it's It's actually quite a lot if you're just doing ebooks, but once you start put audio books and MP3s on there, it really chews up the space cuz and PDFs and stuff like that. an audio, um, a regular Amazon book might be 100 kilobytes or something like that.

or a couple hundred kilobytes so you can fit. You know, a lifetimes worth of books on here, but yeah, uh. music, uh, mp3s and stuff like that. Audiobooks really chew up your 4 G gigabytes real quick.

and it really is lacking an SD card slot. How hard would it be to put in a Micro SD card? They've left it out deliberately and they' I You know I could guess at the reasons for them leaving it deliberately out. Um, that's Amazon By the way, this is designed by a company called Uh Lab 126 Lab 126.com they're in uh California and um and I don't think they're owned by Kindle but they're the ones who actually uh designed this thing and they've done an awesome job. So my hats off to Uh Lab 126 and Amazon it's a real killer product I Love it! but you know there's a few little gripes I don't like about it.

but H the E in display is nothing short of pornographic. It really is. It's just techno porn porn for engineers and Geeks ah, it's just phenomenal 800x 600 display and H it just looks like real paper. I'm just I'm Gob smacked I really am I Highly recommend you pick one up the Amazon Kindle Beauty Yeah,.