Online retailer Amazon.com announced today that it had dropped the price of its standard Kindle electronic reader
Web Browser
Turns out that Kindles comes with a functioning experimental browser. The Kindles user guides states that
Your Kindle comes with an Experimental application called Basic Web which is a Web browser that is optimized to read text-centric Web sites. It supports JavaScript, SSL and cookies but does not support media plug-ins (Flash, Shockwave, etc.) or Java applets.
Yes, it’s rather slow and clumsy, but it’s unlimited use free of charge.
Read RSS Feeds
You can use the browser to access online RSS readers such as http://m.bloglines.com and http://mowser.com to access any RSS feed. Or, you can use third-party tool such as KindleFeeder which can aggregate your favorite feeds, convert them into easy-to-navigate format and deliver wirelessly onto your Kindle device at scheduled times for free.
Gmail
The Kindle’s web browser allows you to access webmails such as Gmail or Yahoo. However reading email on Kindle can be slow and awkward. Since there’s no scrolling function on Kindle, you have to read your emails in pages. The best choice is to use Google’s “mobile” version of Gmail by access http://m.gmail.com from your Kindle browser.
Yahoo Messenger
You can access Yahoo mobile messenger site to IM on Kindle. However, I don’t recommend it as it drains battery and you have to manually refresh the page periodically to check for new message.
GPS
the Kindle allows you to plot your current location on Google Maps. It’s not really turn-by-turn GPS, but it’s still a useful feature. To access Google Maps, use the following shortcuts when you are in Browser Mode:
Alt-1 Show current location in Google Maps
Alt-2 Find gas station nearby
Alt-3 Find restaurants nearby
Alt-5 Find custom keyword nearby
MP3 Player
Since the Kindle is also an audio book reader, it comes with speaker and headphone jack. This means you can turn it into a MP3 player and play your favorite music in the background while you are reading!
Picture Viewer
Even though it’s black and white and the quality is not the greatest, nevertheless you can use Kindle to view your favorite pictures. You can also set your own picture as the screensaver.
By Chris on Jul 18, 2009 | Reply
While it’s neat that you can access gmail and yahoo, have you ever tried to access Microsoft Outlook versions of webmail? I have and they don’t work, which is a shame because I had hoped I could use my kindle as an emergency email machine while away from work (e.g., weekends, vacation) w/out having to lug around my laptop all the time. I did some investigation and found out the problem seems to lie in kindle’s cookie management; when/if a web server issues cookies during a redirect — which is common during authentication — then the kindle will not process these cookies properly, i.e., logins will always fail. Big bummer. It’s possible that the kindle is following the http spec correctly and all other major browsers don’t, e.g., internet explorer and firefox, but even so, you’d think this was a common enough misinterpretation of the spec that the kindle would also follow suit. Very disappointing
By Kerry on Nov 19, 2009 | Reply
It looks like the pseudo-GPS feature is disable now. Bummer.