Demand for the Kindle has been very high and at times Amazon has had trouble keeping the wonderful little device in stock. Well, apparently they don’t have those supply troubles any longer and are ramping up to battle the iPad. Here are a couple of Kindle commercials that are now airing:

1. No electronic ink.  Until you have spent some time with e-ink, you will never understand how much nicer it is than an LCD screen.  Here is a quick example.  Read a page of text off your computer monitor.  Then read a page of text out of a big, hardcover book.  How much nicer is reading that text out of the book?  There isn’t the eye strain associated with a computer monitor, the letters are crisp and clear, and you can see the book in sunlight.  This is the difference now between the iPad and the Kindle.  I doubt we will see many iPads on the beach.
2. No known ability to load books from outside the iTunes store.  Will this allow you to download free books from Google?  Or can you load books from USB?  I have plenty of books I have obtained outside the Kindle store sitting on my Kindle.  There is no hint that this will be available on the iPad, or if it is if it will be anything close to easy.

Now, if they decided instead to make a great tablet PC, here are a few things they are missing:

1. No web cam.  Seriously, you built an ultra-portable and don’t think people are going to use the webcam on it?
2. No Flash or Silverlight support in the web browser or elsewhere.  This has the same crippled browsing as the iPhone.
3. Not a “real” OS.  OK, I realize this is a stripped-down version of OS X.  But I cannot load my own programs or other programs from the internet on this.  It cannot MULTITASK.  This computer is severely limited compared to my cheap-as-dirt Asus Netbook.  Which has all those things I just mentioned, and does them pretty well.

This picture pretty much sums it up for me:

• Personas – A new type of theming,
• Stability improvements,
• Performance improvements,
• Open video and audio based on HTML 5.

I can only comment on two of these.  I could not get any selected persona to work.  I believe my current theme is conflicting with this new feature.  I don’t really care as this isn’t something that really improves the Firefox experience, IMO.  However, I have seen a significant memory gain.  Before I upgraded I had three tabs open, running at 277 MB.  After reinstall with the same three tabs I had 77 MB, which shot up to and stayed at around 150 MB after some page changes, etc.  I would say that that is a significant improvement.  Better memory usage by Firefox means my whole system runs faster because I have more RAM free.  I almost always have Firefox open since my primary job responsibility is developing applications that run in a web browser (Silverlight, ASP.Net).  At home Firefox is my browser of choice.  It is more features and has a bigger plugin ecosystem than Chrome, and is much more secure and must faster than IE.

I recommend downloading Firefox 3.6 today.

Now to the bad part, which is the part I was looking forward to the most: PDF support. Kindle PDF support pre-2.3.2 firmware consisted of one emailing yourkindleaddress@free.kindle.com with a PDF, and it would email an AZW file back. The file was then placed on the Kindle. It works well, but is a little tedious. The new firmware supports native PDF rendering, which means you can place a PDF directly on the device and it will display. This is where the support ends. I placed a PDF on the device. It was unreadable. The text was tiny.

Amazon has not implemented two critical features of Adobe’s PDF reader: zoom and text flow. On the Kindle, you cannot zoom in on the PDF nor can you change the text size. Text flow is also not enabled. Pages are shown in their native size, which on the Kindle is small.

I cannot believe Amazon is calling this PDF with a straight face. Come on Amazon! I love you guys. You always treat me right. When you mess up an order you always fix it immediately. Don’t mess with me now. If you don’t have PDF support ready yet, then don’t release it. Software is hard to write and even harder when you are dealing with a device with limited processor like the Kindle. We will all understand if you need to wait.

I wrote a short blurb on this a few days back.

The Kindle 2 has built-in mount points for a case (or anything else for that matter) on the left edge of the device.  It should be noted that other companies are building cases that work with the Kindle 2.

The mount points are utilized by the Amazon Leather Case.  The bottom mount point is like a hook that rotates into the Kindle.

The second clip on the case is spring-loaded.  It slides up to click into the Kindle, then slides down to hold the Kindle firmly in the case.

The whole package feels like a book.  It is certainly lighter than a typical book, and holds more information!  The case holds the Kindle well.  I have full confidence when holding the case that the Kindle will stay in place.

As you can see, it is thin and very portable.

If you are going to buy a Kindle you better buy the case as well.  Sure its $30, but it is well worth it.  It was built for the Kindle and works well.  It seems to be built with quality.