Amazon.com has released Kindle for iPhone (download), providing iPhone users with the ability to read more than 240,000 Kindle-formatted books from Amazon’s e-book library. It’s a free download from the App Store.
You can access all the Kindle e-books in your Amazon account, downloading and storing them on your iPhone or iPod Touch for later reading. The Kindle app will also sync your place to Amazon’s servers, allowing you to switch between the iPhone and Kindle hardware without losing track of where you are.
According to Amazon, Kindle for iPhone supports only books, not newspaper or magazine subscriptions. You also can’t buy books directly from the app, but must use Amazon’s Web site or the Kindle hardware.
C/Net’s Ina Fried misplaced her Kindle last year.
I not only lost the device, but also any means of reading several e-books that I was in the middle of.
That all changed on Wednesday. My Kindle is no closer to home, but by downloading the new Kindle app for the iPhone (which also works on my iPod Touch), I was able to recover access to my virtual library. Not only that, but thanks to Whispersync, I was able to start reading right where I left off. Whispersync is Amazon’s technology for keeping one’s place in a book across multiple Kindles or cell phones.
The experience highlights both the pros and cons of the “digital locker” approach taken by Amazon with Kindle content. Although some have criticized the fact that one can’t resell or give away their Kindle books, the site does provide other aspects of true ownership. In this case, I didn’t need to re-buy anything and as soon as I entered my account information, I had access to every book I had purchased for the Kindle. (Periodicals don’t work on the iPhone or iPod Touch.)
As for reading on the iPod Touch (or iPhone), I found it quite acceptable for my 15-minute public transit commute to work. The iPod’s small size makes it easy to read on a crowded train. One can even hold the iPod and flip pages in one hand while hanging on to a handrail with the other hand.
Nearly a quarter of all handsets sold in the U.S. during the fourth quarter were smartphones, according to the NPD Group, a market research firm. Their study, released on Tuesday, indicates that about 23 percent of all handset sales in the U.S. during the fourth quarter of 2008 were smartphones. This was up from 12 percent of all handset sales in the fourth quarter of 2007.
The average price of a smartphone during the quarter dropped by 23 percent from $216 in the fourth quarter of 2007 to $167 during the fourth quarter of 2008, NPD said.
