The Kindle Fire is Amazon’s first tablet and while it has a lot of good things going for it, one of the three biggest disappointments with the Kindle Fire is the fact that it comes with just 5.37 GB of available storage space (plus an additional 1.17 GB for apps) and doesn’t have any memory card slots or support for USB drives for memory expansion.

Amazon opted to use the opportunity to promote their cloud storage service on the Kindle Fire instead, where you store your files online with Amazon to access them from anywhere you have an internet connection. Cloud storage is a good option, and you can use other cloud storage services too (more on this below), but there are some other ways to add more storage, ones that don’t require you to be connected to the internet to use them.

Filed under: Amazon Kindle, How To | Tags: kindle fire | 3 Comments »

When it comes to reading ebooks, the Kindle Fire is a lot different than other Kindles. For one, the Kindle Fire automatically sequesters sideloaded ebooks and documents from Kindle Books, making them appear in a separate section for documents instead of the main ebook library list.

Thanks to Calibre, there is an easy fix for this if you want to get your sideloaded ebooks (non-Amazon ebooks) to appear in the ebook library along with all your other Kindle ebooks.

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If you saw the video I posted the other day showing the partial refresh trick on the Sony PRS-T1, you probably noticed the modified homescreen on my PRS-T1 that looks just like the regular homescreen but adds some nifty new features.

The new homescreen has three pages instead of two. The third page is an app drawer that list the Android apps installed on the PRS-T1. The second page consists of shortcuts to certain apps and the first page lists recently read titles instead of the default recently added.

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The Amazon Kindle is no longer the only major E Ink ereader to have text-to-speech. The Sony Reader PRS-T1 is now capable of offering TTS as well, but there are a couple of catches, 1) the PRS-T1 has to be rooted and 2) text-to-speech will only work with DRM-free ebooks.

The minimal rooting package for the PRS-T1 comes pre-loaded with two ereading apps that have TTS capabilities built-in, FBReader and Cool Reader. All you have to do is download the TTS data package to enable text-to-speech on the Sony PRS-T1.

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A reader sent in a tip about the Pandigital SuperNova and how easy it is to install the Android Market and Google apps, no rooting or hacking needed.

The Pandigital SuperNova is an 8″ Android tablet much like the Pandigital Nova that I reviewed and rooted several months back. The SuperNova is the better unit with its superior feature-set. It has a capacitive touchscreen instead of resistive, Bluetooth, and it has a faster processor—1 GHz opposed to 800 MHz.

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Yesterday, thanks to a tip via MobileRead, I discovered a simple trick to get the Sony PRS-T1 to enter into a semi-permanent partial page refresh state. This is very handy for scrolling through lists like with the Dropbox app and root explorer, and makes some games and other Android apps work better too.

This probably works on non-rooted Sony Readers as well but it’s only going to be useful on a rooted Sony PRS-T1 because using the Sony apps (the browser, homescreen, and Reader app) resets the partial refresh back to normal.

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There’s now a simple way to active landscape mode on the Kindle Touch. For some reason Amazon neglected to give the Kindle Touch landscape mode and they’ve yet to issue a firmware update to add it, but thanks to developers at MobileRead, activating landscape mode on the Kindle Touch is now as easy as playing an MP3 file, no jailbreaking or hacking required.

For the most part, landscape mode works well on the Kindle Touch and so does most of the features. There are still a few bugs that need to be worked out but the fix is still in its early stages. With a little more time it will probably be just about perfect. It makes you wonder what’s taking Amazon so long.

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I don’t know about you guys, but I’m really liking the Kindle Fire and I haven’t even rooted it or installed any ROMs yet. But one thing I don’t like is the web browser.

The Kindle Fire comes with its own special web browser called Amazon Silk that was developed by Amazon’s engineers. It is supposed to be awesome and fast and revolutionary—that’s what Amazon wants you to think—but I don’t like it. For one, the viewing area is way too small. There’s about a half an inch of wasted space at the top and another half an inch of wasted space at the bottom.

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There’s a simple trick to change the default font type to use custom fonts across all ebooks for Kindle devices (except the Kindle Touch and Kindle Fire). You can customize line spacing, margins, and justification as well. And this includes both DRM protected ebooks and ebooks without DRM.

The Kindle does not need to be jailbreaked or hacked in any way. All that is required to make font and layout changes is a free plugin for Calibre called Kindle Collections, some font files, and a few minutes to set everything up.

Filed under: Amazon Kindle, How To | Tags: fonts, kindle 3, kindle 4 | 6 Comments »

The Sony PRS-T1 comes with seven font choices, but the selection doesn’t end there. Like the earlier Sony Readers, you can add OTF and TTF fonts of your choice to a font folder on the PRS-T1 and have your ebooks use those fonts instead of the default.

The process of setting up and using custom external fonts on the Sony PRS-T1 is pretty much exactly the same as the older Sony Readers, there’s just a different file path you need to use for the fonts to work properly.

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