So the next day of Kindle Fire delivery, I got Kindle Touch delivered.
tl;dr - I like it.
Unlike Kindle Fire, it is a single-purpose device that does one things: reading an ebook (and personal documents and all that).
Hardware
The hardware is pretty light and easy to hold. Because it is a touch interface that accepts taps to go through pages, it is possible (not that easy though) to hold it in one-hand and turn pages. It would be great for people who want to read in a train while standing (not me :D). It also supports swiping left and right turn pages.
Speaking of swipe, you can swipe up and down to go to previous/enxt chapters, which is handy when reading articles and newspapers I think.
Touchscreen
I was a bit curious about the performance of touch screen of e-Ink. It works reasonably well. Because I haven't had any other Kindle devices I can't compare, but to me it is responsive enough. Ability to select a word to lookup on built-in dictionary and highlight for notes is something you'll greatly miss if you have a non-Touch Kindle, in which case you have to use D-Pad to select words.
Cut and scanned PDFs
Because Kindle hasn't launched in Japan yet, it is still popular to create your own eBooks using a cut-and-scan technique. I have a bunch of these PDFs, and sending them to this Kindle doesn't really make a readable experience. You have to optimize the PDF bu cutting surrounding spaces, and make it a monochrome rather than grayscale, etc.
I scanned most of the books I had in Japan by BookSCAN, and they have a service to optimize the PDFs for various Kindle devices. I tried that, and it makes somewhat readable PDF, but it still hurts my eyes. Can't wait for the launch of Amazon.co.jp Kindle store!
Read Later
This has little to do with the new Kindle Touch, but because this is my first real Kindle device, I toyed with a little bit about Reading apps, sending articles to Kindle automatically.
There are many, many applications available in this field: InstaPaper, Read It Later and now Readability and Evernote.
For my iPad and Android reading app, I've been using Read It Later - because Instapaper doesn't have a decent Android apps (well, there are many third party apps, but none of the ones I tried matched what I liked and wanted to use).
But Read It Later doesn't support Kindle output, at least not natively.
I've searched through alternatives to find out something that supports Kindle, but because I already integrate RIL to my browsers and Google Reader shortcut extensions, i don't like to change all of them. The options I have is to sync the RIL to some other services. Yeah, all of this feels a lot like Plagger or Pipes recipes now :)
I ended up Klip.me. It supports adding via bookmarklet and browser extensions much like RIL, but also supports fetching feeds from Google Reader. The generated articles have chapters for each web page, and works perfect on my Kindle.
So what should I do? I should just convert ReadItLater unread articles as a fulltext RSS feed, then subscribe to it on my Google Reader, and then tell Klip.me to fetch that from my Google Reader (with a special folder for Klip.me).
First i tried ReadItLater feed app, but it doesn't generate a fulltext feed for me, so I created my own little app that does it, and host it on dotcloud.
It worked. Beautifully. I get all the unread articles on ReadItLater on my Kindle, automatically delivered once a day. Hooray.
Conclusion
Overall I'm pretty happy with Kindle Touch. It is reponsive, easy to use in one-hand, and ability to use touchscreen to turn pages and select words is super.
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