Some notes on the Amazon Kindle app on the iPhone

I've been twittering with a dash of friendfeed instead of blogging over the last few months, but I'd like to add more than 140 characters to the discussion on the release of the Amazon Kindle app to the iPhone. I've put up a quick Flickr review of the app here.

In particular:

1. The Amazon Kindle app is a pretty nice ebook reader. It has a similar feature set to eReader and Stanza, and it does a good job of displaying and downloading existing titles purchased at Amazon for the Kindle reader.

2. It doesn't seem to be hamstrung to make it a less attractive reading experience, although the Amazon spokesperson slammed the iPhone experience in this WSJ article:

"Mr. Freed says he expects that users of the iPhone application would read their books for 20 to 30 minutes at most, after which eye strain or battery life might become a problem."

The primary downsides are that it (a) only allows you to transfer ebooks that are in your Kindle, not newspapers, blogs and (presumably) other content that you've sent to the Kindle; (b) doesn't have the ability for you to buy new content within the application, as can be done with eReader and Stanza; (c) doesn't appear to have the text-to-speech capability of the Kindle 2 (although Amazon has backed off on offering this feature on all ebooks).

3. The ability to autosync your bookmarks for your ebooks between devices is a great feature and appears to be working between my iPhone and Kindle 1 in preliminary testing.

The WSJ article alludes to supporting other devices in the near term.

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