About a year ago I wrote about my solution to keep yourself in sync if you’re reading some book once more. The root cause of the problem was inability to reset the “furthest page read” marker easily. Today I was checking something in my Your Kindle Library section of my Amazon’s account and found this:
Yes. Now we have a way to clear the marker and start from fresh. Pretty nice.
Few weeks back my Kindle 5 Paperwhite was delivered and I started exploring it. You can read the initial review. Some time has passed and now I can clearly say what has worked and what didn’t.
First one thing I didn’t noticed during the first review. The display on new Kindle is not that deep in the body as it was in previous version. Looks better and feels better. Good improvement.
What I also like is the new fonts. Palatino. Like it. Good for my eyes. Done. The uneven distribution of light from frontlight is visible, yes, but if you’re reading (if I’m reading) it’s not disturbing or anything like that. You see letters and move eyes. No problem.
In the initial review I was complaining about a need to swipe the display while turning it on and missing home button. After few weeks of usage I really don’t care about the home button. The UI is simply fast enough and I’m not using it that often as I thought. 
The swipe still feels odd. It doesn’t bother me, but I have a feeling I could be happier without it.
The new UI, even after the time, doesn’t look boring. Fine with me. On the other hand the Cover View is a disaster. I tried to use it once more, but couldn’t stand it. Back to rows. Amazon needs to work on this a lot.
The battery life doesn’t seem to be affected by the frontlight. Mine still lasts way, way more than a week (with Wi-Fi turned on).
I still like it. I’m really enjoying reading in bed with lights turned off. When I’m done, I just turn off Kindle, put it down and go to sleep. Really, really good experience.
It has been few days with my Kindle 5 Paperwhite. I was curious about the new frontlight. I have to say I was happy with Kindle 4 Touch, as well with previous versions. But Amazon again came with something I had to see and try. And this one seemed pretty interesting (well as with the touch few years back 
).
First and foremost, I like Kindles. I read a lot thanks to Kindles. And I’m not going to describe all the cons we all know and were cons with Kindle 4 Touch or even Kindle 3 Keyboard. All applies here too. I’ll describe only changes – good or bad – that I feel, as an advanced user, moving from Kindle 4 Touch.
First it’s the turn on experience. In previous one, you pushed the button on bottom and that was it. Now you have to press the button and swipe the screen. One more step. I don’t know whether there was massive number of users turning on Kindle in i.e. backpack and messing up with books, but never ever that happened to me. So I see this as a weird change.
Talking about more steps, new Kindle misses the home button previous one had. Now it’s completely, absolutely, touch only. Not sure about it. I used the button because it was there, but I was not relying on it that much. Now if you want to i.e. go from book to home screen (to do something else) you have to touch the top 1/6th (guessing) and touch home icon. Yes, it’s a more steps, but I’m not doing that that often. And actually often while also checking time on Kindle (to see whether I have time for something else, like an another book etc.), so the top bar is visible. Let’s see how it turns out.
There’s also slightly new design of the UI (nothing fancy) and new view for home screen. It’s called Cover View and basically shows book covers of your books. Though great idea, i.e. on iPhone it’s very good, it’s somehow somewhat half baked here. By default you see only 3 books (collections included) in one (top) row and the bottom row is filled with recommended books (similar selection to one you see on various places on Amazon’s site). And you cannot turn it off. Well you can. Turn on parental control and turn off the store (you can still buy books through website from computer). Half baked, in my opinion. Hope it’ll be changed with next firmware.
On the other hand, what’s pretty damn good is the feature learning your reading speed and with this knowledge showing you time to next chapter (or similar mark). Great idea.
The frontlight is good. Though as Scott Hanselman already pointed, it’s not same across the whole surface, works good in dark room. You don’t need any other light. And outside or in a room where there’s enough light, it doesn’t bother. You can leave it on.
Because Kindle is also about reading, it’s good you have now wider selection of fonts. You can use Baskerville, Caecilia, Caecilia Condensed, Futura, Helvetica and Palatino. I personally need on Kindle, probably because the screen is more like a book than a computer/tablet display, serif fonts. Caecilia is default, but compared to Baskerville and Palatino not that nice (my opinion). I tried Baskerville, but I think it’s too thin and precise for Kindle’s screen. Palatino looks best (again, for me).
The fonts are related to screen. I’m sure the new one is better, simply because it’s another generation, so there was/is probably some improvement, but I was fine with previous one too. (I don’t want to judge based even on feelings, because I’m afraid I’ll be skewed to say it’s better because of simple fact, it’s a new toy. )
Size is little bit smaller compared to previous one. Scott Hanselman said he has a problem comfortably holding it. I had same problem with Kindle 4 Touch, but once I find the trick to grab it, it’s not a problem. And same applies to the new one – not a problem.
Overall the system seems to be little bit faster, but I didn’t done any scientific measurements, just feel. New fonts, reading speed and frontlight are I think key new features. Maybe the first two will be available to previous Kindles with firmware update, who knows. Do I still like it? Yes. Do I regret buying? No. Any questions? Feel free to ask in comments.
When I bought my Kindle 4 Touch I was satisfied with it. But there were few pieces I was missing and previous versions have them. But with firmware 5.1.0 it’s running on full steam back again.
What I like (and I was missing) in particular is landscape mode and highlighting across pages. The new homescreen layout is nice too.
Landscape mode isn’t looking that intersting on a first sight, especially if you read ebooks only. But if you read also PDFs or ebooks with some graphs, tables or images, it’s sometimes way easier to view these in landscape than to have it “overzoomed” in portrait and constantly jump right and left.
Highlighting across pages was problem before. If you had a text, that spanned two (or more ) pages, there was no way to highlight it all in one. You either highlighted it in pieces (lame) or tried to jump between chapters to align the text on one page (lame as well). Right now, if you move your finger to the bottom right corner, the page turns and you can continue highlighting. Sweet.
And finally the new homescreen isn’t looking bad either. At least initially (you know, it’s something new). But only time will prove whether it’s better or not. Right now I have a feel it’s more easy to take in.
Good right? Sad think is, there’s currently nothing I’d like to see, so I have nothing to look forward to in next version. 
The Kindle 4 Touch has, as expected, new (improved) browser experience. It’s pretty good in fact, for quick look and read on some pages or for reading articles in your Instapaper.
If you’re a site owner, you may want to know accesses from Kindle to your site (i.e. to provide simplified version). The User-Agent for Kindle 4 Touch with latest firmware (in time of writing this post – Kindle 5.0.0 (1370280073)) is:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux armv7l like Android; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.2+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0 Safari/533.2+ Kindle/3.0+
Probably the interesting piece is Kindle/3.0+, so you can distinguish previous Kindle 3.
When I first saw the news about new Kindle coming and being with touch support, I was calm. I didn’t seen why would somebody need touching it. You know, I’m reading on my Kindle. And I’m reading a lot (in fact, I’m reading, except technical books and papers, as you’d expect also various different genres I wouldn’t thought I’d ever read). Next page, sometimes previous page button. That’s 99% of my “hardware” interaction with my Kindle. When it first came out, again nothing. Why should I buy new one, I thought. I don’t know what happened after few weeks, but I found myself checking the new Kindle. Probably the most interesting piece for me was a missing keyboard. I’m typing probably only hundred or so characters in a month aka nothing.
Boring story for the beginning. Now about the Kindle 4 Touch itself.
Although you can check the dimensions compared to Kindle 3 Keyboard, something different is feeling. Yes, it feels smaller, but also – to me – little bit heavier and also thicker. The thickness is actually good. The previous Kindle was to thin for my hands. The new one is more comfortable to hold.
There are no buttons, except one, that brings you to home screen, every time. You’re turning pages by touching right (approximately) two thirds of screen of one third on left side. Flipping also works. Touching about two centimeters on top shows you the menu (when reading a book). The touch layer is infrared layer above the screen. It has advantage of being able to register touches not only by finger, but also using i.e. pen. On the other hand, the display is little bit deeper in device (so if the light goes from side, there’s a small shadow, that I find sometimes disturbing). Multitouch is also supported, so you can i.e. change the size of letters using pinch-to-zoom gesture. I’d like to see the display after few months of usage. More cleaning will be probably necessary. After few weeks of using, I don’t see any problem using touch to turn pages. And because there are no buttons on sides, I can rest my thumbs on these margins without turning page accidentally from time to time as with Kindle 3.
The UI inside is similar to previous version, but improved to flow nicely with touches. I have to say, that was the part I was scared of a little when ordering. But no, the UI and touch goes hand in hand, frictionless.
But there’s one downside, I hope will be solved in next firmware version. Rotation. Right now there’s no way (or I don’t know it 8-)) to rotate the screen. Although a lot of non-Amazon publishers are now offering more and more books not only in PDF, but also in MOBI/EPUB formats, occasionally I use PDFs. In landscape mode, it’s easier to read it, especially if the PDF was (probably was) meant for printing and font size is “regular”.
The rest of Kindle properties are still there. Great display, easy to read. Simple books buying and delivery. Wireless delivery of documents. Decent speed. Long (I mean long) battery life. Etc. etc. etc.
Obbligato question at the end. Would I buy it again? Yes, I would. Do I regret it? No, I don’t.
If you have any question or something to try, feel free to ask in comments. I try to answer to my best.