Many folks will consider the latest update to Kindle for iPad and iPhone to be a big yawn but I’m quite excited by it, for a couple of reasons.
First, it adds a feature that I sorely missed when I passed my Kindle 2 on to my wife and adopted the iPad for reading ebooks: a dictionary. The ability to simply call up the definition of a word while reading a book really enhances the experience. (Especially in some of these Sci-Fi novels I tend to read…) While this is a welcomed addition to the software, Amazon takes it even one step further and employs both Google and Wikipedia lookups for words and phrases. Awesome.
On the iPad, the ability to search the text of the book has also been added, making it much easier to use Kindle books as reference material and on iOS 4 devices (iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS) Fast-User Switching has been added. This is coming to the iPad “some time in the fall” when Apple will unify the iOS code base for iPhone and iPad devices.
All that said, what really excites me is that Amazon is moving in the direction of feature parity with their own hardware devices. Hopefully, this will soon include some of the social networking features (Facebook, Twitter connections) that have been added to the latest Kindle 2.5 firmware update and will continue as new ideas for future updates are conceived.
Kindle for iPad and iPhone is available now for free in the app store.
Disclosure: http://dsclzr.us/0
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