Kindle App for the iPhone - My Review

I've been using the Kindle application for the iPhone for a few weeks.  Overall, it's a great way buy books quickly.  The iPhone screen is very legible and 'flicking' between pages works very well.  I read on it for four hours straight and I didn't have any eyestrain issues.

It's a very "release 1.0" product, though.  Currently, buying books using the phone is a pain.  When we were flying home from California last week I wanted to buy Outliers, an excellent book by Malcolm Gladwell.  We had just sat down on the plane so I had around 15 minutes to get the book before I had to turn off my phone.  The first thing I did was fire up the Amazon iPhone App.

It's there, but you can't buy it.  Next, I went to Amazon's site using Safari.  The default when you go to amazon is to use the special iPhone version of the site.  Here's what I found when I searched for "outliers kindle".

Here it says it isn't available.  At this point I was about to give up, but on a whim I went to the regular version of the site and navigated to the Kindle store.

Ta Da! I found it with around 5 minutes to spare.  What is really cool is after you buy the Kindle book, the application can download the whole book (over 3G) in less than a minute. 

I bet the iPhone 3.0 software + a Kindle software update will fix all of the book buying issues, but for now it's a pain.

Here's one thing you won't see on a Kindle, book covers in color!

The Chelsea Handler book was for Jonnell.  Really.  Although she did reference Outliers on her show last week, which impressed me.

When I was reading the Outliers book, which I heartily recommend, I found a couple of bugs and/or annoyances I hope they can fix.

So, when there is a table of text the app uses scroll arrows to go across the table.  Here's an example:

There are two problems.  First, the arrows don't work all of the time.  I'd say around 20% of the time they didn't work.  The larger problem was some text was lost on the top of the next page.  Here's the page after this table:

There was supposed to be a new paragraph starting at the top of the page, but it appears that at least one line was cut off.  It isn't at the end of the table when you scroll over, either.

Another problem is with footnotes.  Outliers has a couple dozen of them.  I think you are supposed to tap the link and you jump to the footnote but none of the links worked.  I did find all of the footnotes at the end of the text.

One thing they may not be able to fix are the resolution of graphics.  Here's an example:

These are pretty hard to read on the iPhone, it would be nice to be able to click on them and have them zoom to either fill the whole screen or even larger so you could pan around the illustration.

The Kindle App for the iPhone is going to be great.  Right now it is very good.  I'm going to keep buying books for it.  Once the bugs are fixed, I think this will give the 'real' Kindle a run for its money.  And if Apple made an iPhone like device with a bigger screen...

Comments

[david toub]

I agree with all of this (and indeed, Outliers was the first book I downloaded for the iPhone app, and am still reading it). I found the same issue with scrolling tables and the inability to enlarge graphics. But the footnote links do work for me. At least so far.

[Eric]

The footnotes links have worked for me in the past, but not the last few times I've used it. Tried restarting the iPhone, no difference ("When in doubt, reboot!" still holds true to this day. Certain apps need it before even working properly at all.)

Its a minor bug, but as a guy who usually reads all the footnotes when he's enjoying a good book, its frustrating.

I sent them some feedback. You should do the same. I followed the 'get support' link on the iTunes Store, which brought me to their Kindle troubleshooting page and there was a big fat Contact Us button on the right.