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Will Amazonв s Kindle Ever Have a Decent Browser

2010-03-09 09:20
Every day for nearly a year now, I 8217;ve used the same device and it 8217;s not a phone. It 8217;s my Amazon Kindle 2. Handsets have come and gone, but without fail, I read at least one chapter a day 8212; usually many more 8212; on the device. But there 8217;s one thing I don 8217;t do. I 8217;m not browsing on the Kindle, which is a shame when you factor in the integrated mobile broadband connectivity. I 8217;m paying $60 each month for the same type of connection for use with my netbooks, notebooks and other devices, but I can 8217;t really take advantage of the free 3G pipe the Kindle offers. The browser is just too painful to use for more than a few minutes. There 8217;s hope for future improvements, though. Webmonkey reports that Amazon is advertising a developer role for its Labs126 group 8212; the folks that develop the Kindle: The role at Lab126 includes designing new features for a new browser while supporting the existing code. Job requirements include familiarity with current web standards and web rendering engines, as well as experience with Java and embedded Linux, both of which the Kindle runs. It 8217;s a safe bet that either someone at Amazon is going to build a better browser for its Kindle device or the company is planning for a revised or different device entirely. But browser code is only part of the equation here 8212; two more pieces to the puzzle come into play and both limit the web capabilities of Amazon 8217;s Kindle devices. First there 8217;s the e-Ink display. For reading basic content like text, it 8217;s arguably quite good. There 8217;s no way I 8217;d be using my Kindle daily if it was difficult to read content. Pictures even look acceptable, although they 8217;re limited by the 600 x 800 display resolution and 16 shades of gray. The bigger issue is the rate of refresh, or how long it take for the screen to render a full page of information. With basic text, like that in a book, it 8217;s just fast enough but nowhere near as fast as hitting page down on a computer, for example. When dealing with web content, it can be an exercise in frustration due to the various content types on a single web page. That issue could be addressed with a beefier browser, but it 8217;s always going to be a challenge 8212; web complexities aren 8217;t going away any time soon. The other issue is also hardware related 8212; the processor inside the Kindle itself. An iFixit teardown of the Kindle 2 reports that the CPU is Freescale 8217;s MCIMX31В 532 MHz ARM-11 processor 8212; В a chip that doesn 8217;t include a graphics processor. It 8217;s great for the primary features of an e-book device, but could struggle with today 8217;s visual web. Pairing it with the eInk display isn 8217;t likely to make for a positive web experience. Helping the Freescale CPU in the Kindle is a display controller from Epson, but again, these components driving a slowly refreshing display can only do so much. Put another way 8212; a YouTube video looks...
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