Yes, I’m still madly in love with my Kindle. While I never actually got around to typing up a review of the Kindle Touch I can say it’s a great device with only a handful of caveats. One of the features that was removed from the Kindle Touch that was present in all previous models was landscape mode. Honestly, I never used it so I didn’t miss it but Amazon has finally added the feature back into the Kindle Touch in the new 5.1.0 firmware update:
- Language Support: Customize your Kindle Touch with the language you prefer: English (US and UK), German, French, Spanish, Italian, or Brazilian Portuguese.
- Landscape Mode: Switch between portrait and landscape orientation in books and PDFs to read maps, graphs, and tables more easily.
- Instant Translations: Tap any word or highlight a section to instantly translate into other languages, including Spanish, Japanese, and more. Translations by Bing Translator.
- Kindle Format 8: Formatting and layout improvements make Kindle books look even better.
- Wi-Fi Enhancements: Connect your Kindle Touch to Wi-Fi with WPS and select WPA2 Enterprise networks.
- Read-to-Me With Text-to-Speech: Have your Kindle Touch read English-language content out loud to you, now including summaries of newspaper and magazine articles when available from the publisher.
- More Sharing Options: Tell others what you’re reading on Facebook or Twitter from anywhere within a book — just tap to share a link along with your comments.
- Onscreen Keyboard Suggestions: Search and shop faster with automatic word suggestions as you type.
Landscape mode is accessibly in the menu, although I wish they would have placed it on the bottom menu bar that appears when you tap the menu button for consistency. Beyond the above mentioned changes the home screen has been updated a bit. The font used to display boots and collections appears to have changed a bit and the top now had three new combo boxes; one for filtering content that appears on the home screen, one for selecting how content on the home screen is sorted, and one for quickly jumping to a desired page on your home screen. Overall the home screen update is minor but welcomed.
The predictive text is a nice touch as well but I don’t type very often on my Kindle Touch so it’s really just a minor update for me. I will also have to play with the supposed WPA2 enterprise update just to fulfill my curiosity. Beyond those updates I doubt I’ll utilize any of the other new features, I mostly use my Kindle to read books and that’s really it.
I’m so glad they updated the Wifi. I spend many hours a day at the college library in school, which uses WPA2 enterprise. When I bought the Touch, I naturally expected things to hook right up, but was quickly disappointed.
Awesome!