kindle – DARYL & JOY

In my last post, I joked about a WordPress app for my Kindle Fire and would you believe there actually is one! I’m actually writing this post on my Fire HD and its quickly becoming obvious that I need a lot more practice with the Fire’s keyboard. I’m not saying it’s better or faster than iOS but there are all kinds of hidden keyboards and shortcuts for entering and altering text. I still haven’t gotten the hang of selecting text to copy and paste either. With no apparent way to take screen shots on the Fire, I can’t show you the cool auto-correct bar that shows up as you type or how easy it is to find obscure punctuation and glyphs. There is one feature I like that’s not on iOS, if you accidentally capitalize a letter in a word and then backspace to it, the Fire doesn’t assume you still want to keep it capitalized. If you ‘re-type the letter, it will now be lowercase. Maybe I’m the only one who likes it that way but it seems to make more sense to me.

I also need to find someone familiar with Android keyboards that can show me what is going on when I hold down my finger and trace from the number/symbol key to the letter keys. There is an orange trail that follows my finger but when I release my finger, there is no effect except the screen saying “The again.”

Well, this about as much as I can type at the moment. Not saying I won’t use my Kindle to blog in the future, but it’s nice to know that’ll work in a pinch.

The other day I was browsing Audible.com looking for something to spend the 2 credits I had accumulated on. I decided to go with “iCon” the book about Steve Jobs and give the other credit to my wife. When I went to check out and download my selection, Audible asked me if I wanted to use Amazon as my Audible log in and just use the same credit card I had on file for Amazon. I clicked yes and then went about my merry business.

Last night I decided to pull out my new Kindle 3 and hop on the treadmill for some exercise. I turned on the Wifi and search for updates and archived items to see if there was a new update out or anything. To my surprise, my archived items count went from 7 to 31! I checked out the list and all of sudden all of the books I had ever purchased were now available for download on my Kindle! So, I decided to pull down the “iCon” book to my Kindle and see how it worked.

It acts just like any other media device that would play back audio files. It shows the book cover in the top right and what you’d expect to see inside the dust jacket or on the back is on the main page. At the bottom are the audio controls and you can play, pause, stop, or skip ahead 30 secs at a time. I wonder if there is a way to add a bookmark to where you stopped? I didn’t have any headphones nearby at the time, but the 2 built-in speakers sounded great. I could even listen to my book over the sound of the tread mill.

I’ll probably continue to listen to my audio books on my iPhone either through the iPod or maybe with the new Audible app (I’m a sucker for badges), but I thought this little “discovery” was kinda neat. It may be a feature that’s been available from day 1 of the first gen Kindle, but I always figured getting your Audible content on your Kidnle would involve downloading, syncing, and transferring and such.