Amazon’s Kindle can do a lot more than just buy and read Amazon-sold e-books. This is often a surprise. I usually wind up in conversations where someone says “I’d like to try a Kindle, but it can’t _______.” Usually, it can.
I was actually surprised when I bought my Kindle not just by how much it could do, but by how well it did it. The Kindle suffers from two things: 1) it’s never going to do everything that a full-fledged computer or even a color touchscreen tablet can do; and 2) the Kindle 3 has improved on a whole slew of features that were either poorly implemented in or entirely absent from earlier iterations of the Kindle.
Here I want to gather up knowledge generated from and circulated by many of my favorite e-reader blogs, just to try to give you an inkling of all the things that a new Kindle can do. For organizational purposes, I’m going to do it as a Q&A. Most of these questions I’ve actually been asked (some of them frequently); others are rhetorical. (There are many features you wouldn’t even think to ask about.)
The key thing you can’t do
You can’t purchase an e-book. You only purchase a license to access it. As we’ve seen, books can disappear. How would we know if content changes were quietly made?
There are other questions
Can I play videos? Can I use the touch screen to move through pages, I play games on it? Can I download all the same apps as I can on Android or Itunes?
I know thats just being silly but if you are comparing platforms that are e-readers you have to take these sort of things that say the iPad CAN do and Kindles CAN’T as well as the things Kindles CAN but iPads CAN’T do.
No I don’t have an iPad, I like the look and the cheapness of the Kindle but it wouldn’t do everything I’d want it to do. I don’t read enough (and don’t want to pay for 3G enough) to make a Kindle worthwhile, whereas something like a Galaxy or iPad would be more worth it.