I've been using a Kindle 2 since July 2010 and been highly impressed with this product.
It allows a massive library collection on the go and free unlimited internet access virtually anywhere on the Amazon Whispernet network. The Kindle has network access across Australia using the mobile phone network even in remote locations, though it doesn't seem to be fully operating on Telstra Next G. The International version is meant to work across the world as well but I've not yet verified that.
On the Arabic support side of things, I've been somewhat disappointed. I've saved a few pdfs that have Arabic stored as images which is a big drain on battery life and is tedious to navigate, but still somewhat useful. Opening Arabic text directly displays only big ugly squares.
Unfortunately I got the Kindle 2 right before the price drop and release of the Kindle 3 in July 2010 which brought a faster, higher contrast screen, is slightly slimmed down size and has unicode support.
Today, after reading about Kindle 3's unicode support, I grabbed a friend's Kindle 3 and was pleasantly surprised to find it opens aljazeera.net (arabic) perfectly.
Currently the Kindle Store has fairly limited Arabic learning resources - the Arabic support only being done by text stored as images, but with the Kindle 3 unicode support there shouldn't be anything stopping publishers from releasing searchable, resizeable, battery friendly Arabic unicode texts. The only potential road blocks I can see is backwards compatibility with the older Kindles and the lack of international keyboard layouts on the Kindle.
So if you'd googled, as I had, and been under the impression the Kindle does not support Arabic, take a look at the Kindle 3rd gen.
I went and ordered a new Kindle DX and expected it to have the same 3rd gen features as the Kindle 3. But it doesn't!
It allows a massive library collection on the go and free unlimited internet access virtually anywhere on the Amazon Whispernet network. The Kindle has network access across Australia using the mobile phone network even in remote locations, though it doesn't seem to be fully operating on Telstra Next G. The International version is meant to work across the world as well but I've not yet verified that.
On the Arabic support side of things, I've been somewhat disappointed. I've saved a few pdfs that have Arabic stored as images which is a big drain on battery life and is tedious to navigate, but still somewhat useful. Opening Arabic text directly displays only big ugly squares.
Unfortunately I got the Kindle 2 right before the price drop and release of the Kindle 3 in July 2010 which brought a faster, higher contrast screen, is slightly slimmed down size and has unicode support.
Today, after reading about Kindle 3's unicode support, I grabbed a friend's Kindle 3 and was pleasantly surprised to find it opens aljazeera.net (arabic) perfectly.
Currently the Kindle Store has fairly limited Arabic learning resources - the Arabic support only being done by text stored as images, but with the Kindle 3 unicode support there shouldn't be anything stopping publishers from releasing searchable, resizeable, battery friendly Arabic unicode texts. The only potential road blocks I can see is backwards compatibility with the older Kindles and the lack of international keyboard layouts on the Kindle.
So if you'd googled, as I had, and been under the impression the Kindle does not support Arabic, take a look at the Kindle 3rd gen.
I went and ordered a new Kindle DX and expected it to have the same 3rd gen features as the Kindle 3. But it doesn't!
The DX Graphite (DXG) is generally accepted to be of the 3rd generation, yet it is a mix of 3rd generation hardware and 2nd generation software. The CPU is of the same speed as Kindle 3 but it is of a different revision. Even though DX Graphite has a larger case, it has only a half of system memory (128MB) than Kindle 3 (256MB). Due to these hardware differences, DXG runs the same firmware as Kindle 2 (currently at version 2.5.8). Therefore, DXG cannot display international fonts such as the Cyrillic font (Chinese or any other non-Latin font), PDF and the web browser are limited to Kindle 2 features.I'm very unimpressed to find this out after buying the DXG for $400. I'll be weighing up now whether to return it and wait for the DX model refresh.
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