As a Kindle owner, I love the fact that Amazon released an iPhone app to allow me to continue reading my content even when I don’t have the actual Kindle with me. Of course, the experience of reading on the iPhone’s much smaller and back-lit screen is worse than on the Kindle, but Amazon has made it a bit better with the new update it just rolled out.
The new 1.1 version of the Kindle app [iTunes link] allows users to read in either portrait or landscape mode. You can also now switch between different background color/text color combinations to make reading easier on the eyes. And turning pages is now easier with tap support and you can now use the multi-touch pinch to zoom in on images. Basically, Amazon has iPhone-ified the Kindle experience.
My favorite thing about the landscape/portrait mode is that while you rotate your iPhone to switch between the two, there’s a lock icon in the lower right hand corner to easily disable this rotation. I wish every app on the iPhone had that, as I cannot stand when things rotate even though I didn’t want them to. The background options of black or sepia along with the standard white is also a nice touch, as it can be hard to read on the white when the screen is fully illuminated.
A couple of weeks ago, Amazon revamped its Kindle book site to be better suited to browse and shop from the iPhone. Now, it seems that the app is already benefiting from Amazon’s recent purchase of the company behind the popular Stanza book-reader app. With this latest update, the Kindle app now shares many of the same features.
