So far we've posted our first look and unboxing of the Kindle 2, followed by a careful examination of the build, screen, and controls on the Kindle 2 in the first part of this review. Yesterday, we posted the second part of our review of the Kindle 2 in which we took a detailed look at the Kindle Store and reading on the Kindle 2. In today's conclusion to our three part obsessive Obsessable review of the Kindle 2, we will examine browsing the web with the experimental basic web browser, viewing images on the Kindle, as well as listening to music, podcasts, and audiobooks both via the experimental MP3 playback and via the Audible support. Finally, we'll conclude with our overall recommendation as to whether the Kindle 2 is the one ebook reader to rule them all, a device that should tempt you to consider making the switch away from traditional books and periodicals.

Figure 1 & Figure 2: Google Reader mobile in the Kindle 2 browser and editing Wikipedia via the Kindle 2 browser (I changed "February 9" to "February 9th")

Online Performance

The Kindle 2's experimental web browser is just that: experimental. It normally runs in a basic mode, but you can enable an Advanced Mode that supports some basic JavaScript. However, dynamic sites don't tend to load well, even in advanced mode, and ones that do load in advanced mode occasionally crash the Kindle 2, so the screen suddenly flashes and then the device reboots. Although the Whispernet 3G connection provided by Sprint is very fast and capable of downloading items from the Kindle Store quickly, the experimental browser fails to meet these speeds. The initial load of larger pages online can take quite some time and after the page does load it's often split into multiple pages that you must navigate through either by using the 5-way controller or by hitting the Next Page and Prev Page buttons on the Kindle 2. Sometimes just moving between these pages can take over 20 seconds.

This slowdown appears to be tied in with the Kindle 2's rendering of images in the browser more than anything else. If you navigate to Menu—>Settings in the browser, you can choose to Disable Images, which speeds up browsing dramatically. Hitting the Next Page button suddenly results in pages turning in just about a second or two. Images, when displayed in the browser, are not available for selection or zooming, as images that appear in actual books and periodicals on the Kindle, so having them gone from your web browsing isn't really much of an issue.

The Kindle browser behaves much like the mobile web browsers you are familiar with from older mobile phones that are not the iPhone, the Palm Pre, or the T-Mobile G1. In fact, a lot of sites that do not work in regular mode (Google Reader and many of the Google Apps) work fine in their mobile version on the Kindle.

You can Twitter, access the mobile version of Google Reader (the full version tries to load but totally freezes the browser), send SMS text messages using the mobile version of Google Voice, send and receive email via the mobile version of Gmail, and both browse and edit wikis like the Wikipedia from the Kindle 2. I found that I could not do things like login to my WordPress blog to update it via the Kindle 2 (the login screen came up but it simply reloaded whenever I clicked Log In). Also, while you can view Google Documents on the Kindle 2, you can not edit them via the device.

You can also manage your Kindle directly from the Kindle itself, by visiting http://www.amazon.com/gp/digital/fiona/manage via the Kindle's browser and logging into your account. Although this is handy, it's unclear why the Kindle Store application that is built into the Kindle 2 (and which runs much faster than the browser) doesn't have a Manage My Kindle page built-in. 

The one thing that the Kindle browser is exceptionally helpful for, besides accessing Wikipedia, is for downloading Kindle (AZW) files, TXT files, unprotected MOBI, and unprotected PRC files, which the Kindle 2 natively supports. If you install the Savory hack (see the last section of part 2 of our review), the browser will also allow downloading of PDFs and other formats that Savory can convert to Kindle-friendly formats.

Figure 3 & Figure 4: Downloading a file via the experimental browser and a PDF converting via Savory

The one serious drawback of using the browser is that all that wireless activity seriously drains the battery life of the Kindle 2 (see the Battery performance section below for more details). Overall, the browser on the Kindle 2 is a useful feature that we hope to see vast improvements on over time. 

Audio Performance

We've already put together two Daily Obsession videos providing an overview of the audio performance on the Kindle 2. There are basically three different audio modes on the Kindle 2. First there's support for audio books via Audible. Although the Audible website doesn't load nicely in the Kindle's browser, you can load Audible-purchased audio books onto your Kindle 2 by placing the files in the Audible folder via a USB connection with your computer. The Audible audio books will show up on the home screen of your Kindle with a small lower-case audio label to the left of the title of the audio book. The first time you click on a Audible book from your Kindle you will be asked to sign in to your Audible account to authenticate your Kindle for playback. As soon as this is done you can start listening, fast forward, rewind, and skip backwards and forwards through chapters on the audio book.

Better yet, you can place any MP3 inside the Audible folder, and it will be treated as if it were an audio book. This is a great way to listen to music or podcasts using the Kindle 2.

An alternate method is to use the experimental MP3 playback ability on the device by navigating to Menu—>Experimental and choosing Play MP3. After doing so, any MP3s that you have put inside the Music folder on your Kindle 2 will begin playing in order from the newest to the oldest file. You cannot rewind, fast-forward, or shuffle the songs, but you can pause the playback by hitting ALT + the space key or skip ahead to the next track by hitting ALT+F. The good thing about this feature is that you can listen to music while using the Kindle 2 to do other things like read a book or periodical. The bad thing about it is that it's very experimental and my Kindle 2 reset itself multiple times when I was testing this feature. 

The other notable audio feature of the Kindle 2 is its new text-to-speech feature which will read whatever book or periodical (it doesn't work with the web browser or the menu system on the Kindle 2) that you have open out loud in either a male or female voice. You can also adjust the speed at which the text is read aloud between 3 settings. You can activate the text-to-speech feature at any time by hitting the up arrow / shift button and the SYM button on the keyboard simultaneously. Hitting this key combination again stops the feature. This feature works much more smoothly than the Play MP3 feature, but it is still experimental and can sometimes be slow to start up and it did cause my Kindle 2 to reset once while I was using it. One thing that takes some getting used to when using the text-to-speech feature is that the Next Page and Prev Page and other navigational controls cease to function while it is on, as the reading takes over control of your Kindle's navigation. This can be useful however if you want to read an article while doing something with your hands. You can turn on the text-to-speech, adjust the speed to your liking, and turn the volume all the way down on the Kindle 2 and the device will auto turn the page for you every so often.

Video: Kindle 2's text-to-speech feature

Although the built-in speakers on the Kindle 2 perform nicely without sounding too tinny and all these audio capabilities are nice to have, they're really not core to the device itself, and only the audio book support is really polished enough to avoid crashing from time to time. Also, all the various audio functions on the device drain the battery much faster than regular usage.

Battery Life

Although Amazon claims that a fully charged battery will last for four days with the wireless on and for weeks with it turned off, they must have tested these times with some light readers. Granted, I've been testing everything I could on the Kindle 2 since I got it and I'm probably on the very heavy usage end of the user spectrum right now, but I still found the battery to be nowhere near as long-lasting as Amazon claims.

If you listen to an hour of audio, it drains the Kindle's battery by about a fourth, so you can probably only last for 4-5 hours of audio listening. If you're just browsing online actively and actively downloading files, then the battery lasts a little over 4 hours. This is with constant use the entire time.

If you leave the wireless connection on all the time and you have several subscriptions that update daily or multiple times a day and you're a heavy user of the device, the battery will last about two days without charging. If you carefully turn off the wireless except for specific times when you want to download something and you don't use the audio features or the browser and you use the device heavily during that period of time for reading, the battery will go for a little over four days before it needs a recharge.

However, there are several things you can do to prolong the charge on the Kindle 2. First, turn off the wireless when you're not actively looking for new content or intending to use it. Second, set the font size to the smallest size you can read comfortably. The larger the font size on the device, the more page turns you will make while reading, and each page turn is what eats up energy as the screen refreshes. Lastly, don't use the audio features.

Despite the battery life underperforming for a heavy user like myself and not meeting the expectations I had for the battery life based on what I'd read on Amazon, the battery life is still amazingly good and it's not difficult to keep the device charged given that it can be fully charged by a USB connection to a computer in about four hours and by plugging into the wall in about three hours.

Hidden features

There is a hidden game of Minesweeper that you can play by hitting the Home key and then pressing ALT + SHIFT (the up arrow) + M. Once the game launches, you navigate the board using the 5-way controller and using the M button to mark/unmark potential mines and clicking on the 5-way to uncover a square. Hitting Menu lets you choose between various modes of gameplay and hitting the R button restarts the game.

Also, the Kindle 2 supports basic photo viewing. First, you must create a folder named "pictures" (without the quotes) on the Kindle 2 while it is connected to your computer via USB. Next create at least one folder inside the pictures folder. This will be, basically, a photo album. Place JPEG, GIF, PNG, or BMP images inside the photo album folder. Disconnect your Kindle 2 from your computer, go to Home, and then press ALT + Z. Your Kindle 2's screen will refresh and there will be a new "book" with the same name as the photo album you created. Opening it you will be able to see your pictures and when you hit the Menu button you will see a variety of controls for viewing the pictures. You can have multiple albums by creating multiple folders of pictures inside the pictures folder.

Figure 5 & Figure 6: An epic loss playing Minesweeper and the picture view menu

In addition to these more interesting hidden features, there are a multitude of keyboard shortcuts that are undocumented by the Amazon Kindle 2 User's Guide. If you type @help in the search box a list of other @ search commands pop up, including @time which pops up the current time and date. 

Overall Performance

Overall, the Kindle 2 is a very impressive digital reader with lots of powerful extras. The Kindle 2 does tend to restart itself from time to time, sometimes when you're using one of the experimental features, and sometimes with no clear cause. However, it starts up quickly enough and remembers the last page you were on so it's not that large of a concern. There are some inconsistencies in navigation, as with, for example, the differences between navigating a periodical and a book that I outlined in the previous part of this review.

The overall organization of the Home screen is somewhat limited. You can either show All My Items or display just your Subscriptions, just your Books, or just your Personal Doc, and you can sort any of these lists by either Title, Author, or Most Recent, but it still can become cumbersome if you have quite a lot of content on the Kindle 2. Also given the support for audio books and the hidden support for pictures, it would probably be better to offer these as options for viewing the files as well.

What's missing?

The SD card slot that was in the first Kindle. Sure the new Kindle has 1.4GBs of user usable space, but why not add on an SD card slot too?

An email client, even a basic experimental one to go alongside the experimental web browser would be very useful, especially if one could jump from reading a book or periodical to email notes, highlights, and clippings to others. Also, improved versions of all the experimental features are needed. A Manage This Device option in the Kindle Store is needed to better manage subscriptions without resorting to a computer.

The most obviously missing thing on the Kindle 2, however, is the lack of any light on the device itself. The most recent Sony Reader has an LED that can be turned on for reading in the dark, and I have no idea why Amazon didn't think to add a similar upgrade to this second version of the Kindle.

However, the most important thing missing from the Kindle 2 is security. There is no lockdown password like the one you can place on your cellphone to keep other people from using it to place calls. Sure, a normal book doesn't have any sort of security, and at least the Kindle 2 can be located via its 3G connection and if you report it stolen or missing, Amazon can unregister it from your account. However, that still doesn't protect against any private documents you decide to put on the Kindle 2 falling easily into the wrong hands.

What we hope to see in future models

• A Previous Page button on both sides of the device, just as the Next Page button appears on both sides of the device would greatly improve the ease of use of the device (which is already easy to use) for people who prefer to hold the Kindle with their right hands. Simply move the home button below the space bar on the keyboard.
• The ability to switch from portrait to landscape view would be great, especially for the web browser. Native PDF support would be amazing.
• Someday we'd like to see color screens on these e-ink devices, but that may still be a ways away.
• An LED light for night reading.
• A locked, password-protected mode to keep our documents secure
• A lower price; considering that the Kindle 2 is a full market for Amazon to sell books, it shouldn't be over $100, in my opinion.

Obsessable Recommendation

If you have money to spare and you love to read and like the idea of carrying an entire library around with you, then you should get a Kindle 2. However, while it's an amazing device, $359 is a bit on the pricey end for a device designed to for the most part simply be a book replacement (especially considering that it only costs an estimated $185 to manufacturer and Amazon makes money off of its book sales). Right now, I'd still characterize the Kindle as being in the early-adopter stages. We'll probably see some extremely interesting e-paper devices coming to market in the coming months and years. That being said, if Amazon lowers the price to $100, then buy one immediately. It is a really amazing device.

Obsessable Rating: 8 out of 10.