Day: February 9, 2009

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Kindle 2 Announced

The long awaited Kindle 2 by Amazon was finally announced today.  It was just as the rumors predicted in appearance.  It has several desired improvements but a few shortcomings as well.

Shape and Size

The Kindle 2 is more attractive than the original.  The new thinner design is impressive.  The tradeoff is that the device now has a bigger footprint.  In some cases the original Kindle would fit in your purse, the Kindle 2 may not.  But the same is true for the thickness giving the Kindle 2 an advantage.  With its new thinness, the Kindle 2 can probably fit more easily into some thin pockets in a bag.  Overall, the new shape is an improvement.

Battery Life

The Kindle 2 has 25% more battery life than its predecessor.  The original Kindle had a very impressive battery life already. It is a good idea to turn off your wifi when you aren’t downloading a new book to get longer battery life.  Under typical use of a heavy reader, the original Kindle would last a good week with wifi off.  More battery life is always a welcome improvement to any gadget though.

Page Turning

The page turning buttons have been redesigned.  One of the biggest complaints about the original was how easy it was to unintentionally turn a page.  The Kindle 2 buttons are smaller so they are not as easy to hit accidentally.  Another welcome improvement is pages now turn 20% faster.  The first Kindle wasn’t exactly slow at page turning but you were often left wishing the page would render just a little faster and now the Kindle 2 does.

Storage

Amazon claims “more storage” in the Kindle 2.  This is a bit inaccurate since it really just has more built-in storage.  The original Kindle had an SD card slot for extra storage which means it could hold more if you used that slot.  The Kindle 2 does have more built-in storage but has removed the SD card slot so you are stuck with just the internal memory.  That isn’t a big problem since the internal storage can hold 1,500 books now.  And if you fill it up, you can delete books but still own them.  At any point, you can have a book re-downloaded to your Kindle.  The SD card slot was probably removed to help allow the device to be thinner.  While this is technically a lost feature, it is an acceptable tradeoff for the new thinness.

Screen

The new screen is very similar to the original except that it now has 16 shades of gray.  This allows pictures to look much better.  If you just read books, this is almost pointless.  But if you read newspapers on your Kindle, this will greatly improve your reading experience.

Book Cover

The original Kindle included a leather book cover.  Unfortunately, now this is a $29.99 accessory for the Kindle 2.  To protect your expensive Kindle 2, you have to buy the book cover which makes the Kindle 2 more expensive than its predecessor.

Conclusion

Most of the changes are positive.  Overall the new Kindle isn’t a huge jump over the original, it is more of several small design improvements.  This is a device any avid reader should definitely have.  For a full description of it, check out the Amazon Kindle 2 page.

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Wireless Draft N Compatability Issues

There are many flavors of wireless networking. Most common are 802.11B, 802.11G, and now 802.11N (Draft). 802.11N is “draft” because the standard has not yet been formalized, despite the sale of draft-N devices for over a year. For most people, this won’t cause a problem. But hitches do come up.

Draft N Works, Usually

When I was recently setting up a D-Link draft-N router with a MacBook Pro, I noticed that the wireless connection would drop regularly or show a connection but be unable to receive/transmit. This was due to the incompatable N implementations. The solution is to go into the router settings and switch it to only using B/G. In most cases, I have found draft N devices to work without any issues.

Future of WiFi Standards

The 802.11N standard is expected to be finalized by the IEEE LAN/MAN Standards Committee (IEEE 802) in November 2009. Then all the current draft-N manufacturers promise a firmware upgrade that will make them interoperable. Of course by November 2009, we might be looking at buying new draft wireless standards, as described by PC Magazine:

802.11s, a mesh networking specification that’s been on the drawing board since September 2003. (It probably won’t be final until September 2010.) Laptops and other devices with 11s support will function as mesh points (or MPs) and form links with each other, allowing packets of data to skip from device to device across the network as needed. Mesh has been around for a while in many proprietary forms, and is important not only because it can extend a network’s range but also because it has self-configuring abilities: Mesh devices can move about without impacting overall performance. In such a network, data will hop around from mesh point to mesh point along the shortest path to where it needs to go. Actual 11s is already in use in at least one product: the One Laptop per Child project’s XO laptop uses it to communicate with XS school servers, in some tests over distances as great as 2km with 802.11s data hops from device to device.

802.11u, called “InterWorking with External Networks,” will provide a Wi-Fi device with methods of connecting securely to a network, based on the external network’s type. For example, if you have access to the cellular connection that provides Internet access to the Wi-Fi router on a bus, 11u will keep that connection secure. It will also allow a Wi-Fi device to discover more information about that external network, such as whether it’s free of charge or not. 11u could be published by March of 2010.

802.11z “Direct Link Setup” is the 802.11 Working Group’s take on improving ad hoc connections, at least for business users. It’s entirely unrelated to what the Wi-Fi Alliance is doing for device-to-device communication. 11n allows two laptops that would normally communicate on a secure network to form a P2P connection to talk to one another exclusively. This happens only after they’ve authenticated security credentials through an AP. It’s a super-secure ad hoc that requires the right security setup.

See a full list of 802.11 standards and approval timelines from IEEE.