Monday, May 7, 2012

Amazon delivers an amazing update

The other day I found a letter from Amazon in my Kindle home screen, alerting me that my Kindle Touch had been updated and listing some of the new features.  I have to say, it was an impressive list!
  • You can go to landscape mode from the document menu. Yay!
  • You can highlight across pages by dragging your finger down to the bottom right corner; this turns the page and lets you keep selecting the text you want to highlight.  Yay! 
  • When you have text selected, in addition to the Add Note, Highlight, and Share options, there is now a "More" option that lets you either search the highlighted string in Wikipedia, translate that text into one of several foreign languages, or report problems with the content! Triple yay!
  • You can set the KT to use a language other than English for menus.
  • The Go To menu now includes the chapter titles as destinations, if the book has a table of contents. 
The translation feature is amazing!  I can't wait to try it out.  As part of the upgrade my Kindle downloaded a boatload of foreign language dictionaries, and I assume the translation program must use them.

The letter also said they had changed the home screen slightly, but the biggest difference I can see if the author name appears in smaller text underneath the title, instead of to the right. I think the sort menu (most recent, by author, by title) is a little cleaner, too.

This upgrade was so full of features it made me feel like I was getting something for free! If you have a KT, I think you will get the upgrade automatically, just by leaving your wireless on in wifi mode.

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