A few much needed features designed to make reading both easier and more pleasant—it’s still free and still an obvious work in progress.

Amazon has released Kindle for iPhone 1.1, an update of their popular ebook app for Apple handheld devices. The new features in this iteration kind of make you wonder why they rushed v1.0 out the door at as these improvements really represent baseline functionality for an iPhone reader:

• Read in portrait or landscape modes
— Convenient lock to fix in either mode

• Select alternate text and background colors to improve contrast and reading comfort in low light

• Tap on either side of the screen to flick pages

• Pinch zoom images

To my cynical eye, these features make Kindle for iPhone truly useable for the first time. However, the great leap forward I’m hoping for won’t be a features or functions created by Amazon’s coders—it will be the much vaunted and long anticipated “iPod touch on steroids”, which it’s hoped will have a 7 inch screen, faster networking and more powerful hardware, especially graphics.

So, now that Kindle for iPhone is useable are you going to start reading books on your Apple handheld? For the time being, my preference will still be audio books on my iPod touch as the screen’s a tad too small to read comfortably (arm and eyes get tired) and listening allows me to catch up on email or Facebook or play solitaire or whatever…

What’s your take?

Related:

Entry was posted on Thursday, May 21st, 2009 at 10:25 am under Free Apps, News, iPhone, iPod Touch.  Print This Post

Read more entries by Ronald O Carlson.
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