Kindle v. Kindle Web Browser Showdown Video. Also, Kindle 3 Article Mode

Len Edgerly (fine reflections and photos at his blog) continues his excellent video reporting on the Kindle 3 -- Darlene's the videographer -- with this demo of the new Webkit-based web browser and the differences between the Kindle 2 and Kindle 3 displays when rendering the same New York Times home page.

Here's the larger version of the video, titled Kindle v. Kindle: Browser Showdown.

  Len talks about the videoclip and wonders if the new Article Mode may be somewhat problematic.

  It's probably not meant to be used on a Home page, though, with many article segments on one web page and a zoom-in box used to identify the beginning of an article.

  Len was in Basic Mode on the Kindle 2, which tends to be faster on that model but, as he points out, makes you look at the Left column contents first.
  For Kindle 2 and Kindle DX owners, here are some tips on using the various modes.

  Basic Mode is the Kindle 2's best mode for comfortable reading (no light grays and it uses larger fonts instead of the small ones used for Advanced mode).

  Kindle 2's Advanced Mode does a Fit-to-Screen display, and of course that's too small to read usually, but you can rotate it manually using the Aa-key and it's sometimes doable that way.  However, this mode does translation of colors to grayscale and this sometimes creates too-dark and too-light areas which are difficult to read.
  However, if javascript is used for log-ins, etc., 'Advanced' mode is needed.

With the Kindle 3, the Non-article-mode should have both a Basic and Advanced mode also, but I won't know until I get mine sometime today.

  The Kindle 3's Article mode seems to function like the wonderful Readability utility (free), which also doesn't like to try to do its own article focus at a Home page.  Readability itself is meant for articles that are displayed in the center area of a webpage once you click on the link to them, and it nicely ignores material to the sides (links, ads, etc.).

  It's probably best to click on an article at the New York Times and then use the Kindle 3 Article mode on that instead.

NUDGEfeature (also available on Kindle 2 and DX's)
Tip: When identifying an area to zoom in on, we can use the shift-key with the 5-way controller/button to "nudge" the zoom-area box in smaller increments.

I found it really interesting how much faster Len showed the Kindle 3 to be when loading the NYT's full home page vs time it took to load the simple mobile-site version that Kindle 2's Web Browser in Basic mode chose.  So, the Kindle 3 web browser is considerably faster on this new model.

Also shown clearly at the left is the difference in contrast range between the screens.  They're both on the Experimental prototypes page

This iPhone 4 video is in high definition.



Kindle 3   (UK: Kindle 3),   DX Graphite

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Check often: Temporarily-free late-listed non-classics or recently published ones
  Guide to finding Free Kindle books and Sources.  Top 100 free bestsellers.
    Also, UK customers should see the UK store's Top 100 free bestsellers.