A review of the Kindle 2.5 update

Amazon recently delivered a much anticipated update for the Kindle 2 and Kindle DX:

Kindle Software Update 2.5

Having had the 2.5 update for a couple of days now, I must say I'm underwhelmed:

Collections. Nice, but it has an unfinished quality. I have gotten used to having only 40-50 items at any given time, using only the modest organization feature that was (Show Books/Personal Documents/Subscriptions/All Items). With this update, this feature was inexplicably removed.

To achieve the same 'minimalist' experience I enjoyed before with no additional overhead, I now have to create Collections for everything and maintain them, and use the Collections view only. There are more navigational clicks involved to get to the things I'm reading than before, and the appearance of Author/Title/Most Recent is far more cluttered than before, since they list EVERYTHING. In short, they have Harshed My Zen (TM)!

They really need to have some builtin, zero-maintenance 'smart' collections modeled on the ones previously implemented as Show options: Personal Documents, Subscriptions, Books (using the same criteria used previously for the Show options). I would also add New Items and Samples, that do the obvious thing. Maybe Unread (when current position is at the defined start), Read (when current position is on the last page), and Started (when position is not at start or end). Let users hide these builtin Collections if they don't find them useful.

Viewing by Most Recent First, Title, or Author preserves the decidedly non-minimalist jumble of page after page after page of content that people complained about in the Great Folder Uprising of 2009, now with the added insult of having to look at Collections mixed in willy-nilly. What the heck is a Collection's Author, anyway? What's the point of showing Collections on any of these views (well, at least Author or Title)? 

To me, the current implementation fails to deliver us from clutter, introduces navigation inefficiency, and saddles us with the overhead of having to Collection-ize each new item as we add it, lest chaos win out (as it no doubt will).

Some automatic categorization to replace the feature they removed (as previously described) would add a little polish, and mollify me somewhat.

And I'd like to be able to set one of the Collections I've created as a default for my HOME view, so I can efficiently select from the handful of things I'm actively interested in at any given time, return to this list easily, and return some Zen to my Kindle.

It will be interesting to see if Amazon cares to polish the feature some more in response to user feedback.

PDF pan/zoom. Nice, but it makes me wish all the more for a similar feature to pan/zoom images contained in the ebooks I actually purchase from Amazon (what a concept!). As it is, the K2 screen is not large enough to view many images, maps, illustrations and scanned-in tables (Kindle's MOBI format's underlying XHTML dialect has very weak table support, virtually unusable). I realize many pre-DX titles didn't include images with sufficient resolution to zoom at all (I think the tools/process used for authoring Kindle content even reduced the resolution to fit K2 if you weren't careful!), but if higher resolution is available, I want to be able to see it!

PDF viewing is still nowhere near as complete as on competing devices: no PDF reflow (reducing the need to Zoom), and more crucially, no support for PDF navigational links. I want PDF annotation, too, but first things first. As it is, almost any device that can view PDFs is better at this than a Kindle. The irony is that Amazon licenses the Adobe Mobile Reader SDK for the Kindle. Why don't they use it just a bit more?

Password protection (so called). This is the first implementation I've seen in years where your password appears in clear text as you type it, instead of '****'. Better make sure you're alone before waking up your Kindle! And all you have to do is plug the Kindle into a USB port to achieve full access to the contents. Of course the DRM content is and always was protected, but personal documents with personal information, y'know, the stuff that actually needs protection in the event of theft? Totally unsecured.

New Fonts. The increased sharpness is nice, some people may find the bigger sizes useful, but while they were at it, couldn't they have added full Unicode support? The version of 'Caecilia' (Kindle's default font) I have on my Mac has this; why not Kindle's? And I would have put in a smaller text size as well, though that would have required careful tuning to keep it sharp (once I have my reading glasses on, I'm equipped for TINY ).

Facebook and Twitter posts. Totally cool. I'm going to be using it, Friends and Followers.

Popular Highlights. Totally cool, once I discovered the option to suppress display of them when I don't want distractions.

Last but not least:

Full title display on item lists when item is selected. Give that programmer a bonus!

Unfulfilled Promises. Where is the voice-assisted navigation they announced? why can't the item list text be made larger? Why don’t they fight for TTS on all books? What does Amazon have against people with visual impairments? What about the K1 owners, who paid $400 for their more primitive device and paved the way for Amazon's current success?

Kindle Hacks blocked, but requirements not obviated. With this update, Amazon briefly made it impossible for people to hack their Kindles, but have done nothing to address the principle reasons people feel the need to do that:

• Desire to customize the screensaver images (maybe I find the Jules Verne image offensive..)
• Replace the Kindle default font with something more readable (some people's eyes can't handle serifs apparently).
• Replace the Kindle default font with something that has better Unicode support (for Russian, Chinese etc.).
• Modify the screensaver timeout period

If they want to stop people from hacking by 99% overnight, that's pretty much the complete laundry list of features they need to implement. The engineering effort would be trivial compared to what it takes to prevent hacking altogether, would reduce customer support costs, and it would delight many, many Kindle users. 


20 June 2010 Update:
Okay, there is sort of a smart Collection called 'Periodicals: Back Issues'. As the name suggests, it is supposed to collect back issues of things you subscribe to. Apparently this does not apply to 'Amazon Daily' - the only thing I currently subscribe to. I have a trial subscription going as of today, we'll see if it does something with that.

30 June 2010:
I've regained most of my Zen since the update: not sure where I picked up this idea, but I have padded out my list of Collections with dummy collections, so that there are exactly 10. This puts my subscriptions/newsfeeds and unclassified, new items on page 2, which I can get to with Next Page. Out of sight, clutter begone!
I've even worked out an efficient way of cycling through the items in my Current Reading collection, by hitting the Back button to get back to the collection list to read something from the 'next' item I'm reading (whereas using Home one first has to navigate into the Current Reading collection, then down one or more times to pick the next item). After Back, the item I was just reading moves to the top of the list, and the currently selected item becomes the next item to read, so that only one click suffices to transition to the next book (once the stack is initialized properly). Thus I'm able to reproduce digitally one of my favorite reading techniques for working through several books at once: I used to keep a stack of books next to my bed, read from the one on top, and when I needed a change, shove it to the bottom of the stack and grab the one on top to continue reading.