DEPENDING on how you look at it, Amazon’s supersized Kindle has been launched just in time, or it’s too little too late.
The Kindle DX is a larger version of the popular (in the US anyway) Kindle e-reader. On the eve of a highly anticipated announcement of Apple’s colour-screened tablet, however, the DX may just find itself struggling for attention. On the other hand, the larger 9.7-inch E Ink screen (the regular one is a 6-inch) may be just enough to keep some interested in Amazon’s electronic book format.
In addition to the larger screen, the Kindle does a few new tricks. Firstly, the screen now auto-rotates, depending on how you hold it. The annoying thing about this is that, like the iPhone with the same feature, the screen goes in horizontal mode if you lay the device down flat. Thankfully, you can lock the orientation. Flipping between portrait and landscape is also slow and results in ghost images on the screen. Memory has been boosted to 4GB (3.3GB available to the user) so that the DX now holds 3500 books – 2000 more than the 6-inch version
