Sunday, October 19, 2008

Kindle Web Browser

I just spent the weekend on the road without a PC. The only technology I had was my Kindle and Blackberry. The bottom line is neither of these are worthy replacements for a good old web browser on a computer.

The Blackberry's browser generally worked OK but at painfully slow speeds. I wish that were the only fault of the Kindle's browser. I realize the Kindle browser is still considered "experimental", but I couldn't believe how many times I got errors loading pages.

The conspiracy theorist in me thinks Amazon and Sprint are starting to lock out certain web pages on the Kindle, particularly those that either (a) result in a lot of data traffic and/or (b) replace a paid service Amazon is trying to sell. Because of the browser's experimental state I suppose it's fine for Amazon to do this sort of thing, but they should at least tell customers what they plan to restrict. Then again, maybe it's just me being paranoid...

4 comments:

Matt Bell said...

Did you try turning on Advanced Mode? Maybe that's too simple--since you've got a Kindle blog--but that solved a LOT of web browsing problems for me.

Anonymous said...

So what sites were you trying to access?

Joe Wikert said...

Several in the KindleKorner bookmarks file. I also tried updating a few Feedbook pages but to no avail.

Anonymous said...

When I first got my Kindle I could use Gmail in the browser. Now I can't. I assume Amazon turned it off and I agree, they should let their customers know.