There’s some good Kindle news to report this morning. First, Amazon has finally started rolling out the Kindle Touch to countries outside the US. Second, Amazon has started selling refurbished Kindle Fires for $179.

Despite the lack of an official announcement, the product page for the WiFi Kindle Touch now has the option to select a country for shipping outside the US. However, the 3G Kindle Touch still doesn’t have an international shipping option, at least not yet.

Filed under: Amazon Kindle, Sales and Discounts | Tags: kindle fire, kindle touch | 1 Comment »

Perusing the Kindle store this morning, I noticed several new Kindle games and active content available for Kindle E Ink ereaders.

I also noticed some of the older games have been updated to support the Kindle 4 and Kindle Touch. So if you have either of the new Kindles, now would be a good time to check out the games and active content section, which includes plenty of freebies too.

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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.

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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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Amazon started rolling out a firmware update for the Kindle Fire earlier today. The new software version is 6.2.2.

Your Kindle Fire may have already updated itself automatically. To check, open settings then scroll down to “Device”. The software number is listed below “System Version”.

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There’s a new firmware update available from Amazon for the Kindle Touch. I just installed it and haven’t noticed any improvements or changes whatsoever. Maybe page turns are a little faster—it’s hard to tell.

The only real difference I can find is that it kills the landscape mode trick I posted about the other day. Instead of showing buttons for rotating the screen, it just shows the code for the buttons instead. This probably means the update breaks other Kindle Touch hacks as well.

Filed under: Amazon Kindle | Tags: firmware update, kindle touch | 3 Comments »

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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Amazon has released a really cool new application for Windows computers called Send to Kindle that allows Kindle users to easily upload and send personal documents and non-Amazon ebooks to Kindle devices, Kindle apps, and Amazon’s cloud from a personal computer.

Send to Kindle stores your personal documents and ebooks to your Kindle account for storage and future retrieval. They get synced and backed up and are available for download anytime. You can even select to send the documents and not have them added to your Kindle library.

Filed under: Amazon Kindle | Tags: apps | 4 Comments »

The SolarKindle is a lighted cover for Kindle ereaders that comes equipped with a solar panel on the front of the case for charging a reserve battery along with the Kindle’s battery.

SolarFocus showed off demos of the SolarKindle cover at CES after announcing it last week so it has been getting plenty of news coverage. It is expected to start shipping around January 15th and costs $79.99. It’s already listed on Amazon.com, complete with a couple of phoney reviews.

Filed under: Amazon Kindle | Tags: kindle 4, kindle touch | 2 Comments »

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.

Filed under: Amazon Kindle, How To | Tags: kindle fire, web browser | 5 Comments »