On a couple of occasions I’ve done some rudimentary research into e-reader apps for iPhone only to be disappointed by the lack of selection or the ease of use. I don’t read a lot of fiction and I’m not all that interested in reading free classics. What I needed was a decent selection of good non-fiction titles and an easy, intuitively searchable source with which to download them if I was ever going to turn my beloved phone into an e-reader.

I have thought about biting the bullet and buying the Kindle device in the past but was turned off partially by the price, partially by the lack of availability, but mostly because I think the first generation Kindle is potentially the ugliest consumer electronics product I’ve ever seen. (I think it speaks volumes about what the product does and does well that it can be as popular as it is while looking like it does).

The recent release of the Kindle 2 solves the appearance problem, but before I could be faced with a buying decision, Amazon decided to answer a few of my minor prayers and dropped the Kindle for iPhone application. Gratis. So there’s $350 that I no longer have to spend to read books electronically.

How it works

The application works pretty much like other e-readers I’ve tried. A quick thumb gesture left or right “turns the page,” so to speak. (”Advancing the content” would probably be a more appropriate phrase). A simple slider interface, not unlike the iPod volume control is used to surf around within books. Bookmarks and type size are easy enough to figure out and the text displays in a black, serif font on a white background making reading easy on the eyes. The app uses a technology called Whispersync to track your progress across all devices: existing Kindle owners can start a book on their Kindle, continue it on their iPhone and come back to it later on the Kindle again without losing their place. It also (naturally) remembers your place when you shut the application and loads to the proper page when you restart.

Downloading Content

Downloading new titles is easy if you have a computer. Not so much if you’re trying to use the phone itself. There is no “Kindle iPhone Store,” as I sort of expected there would be. Pressing the “Get Books” button reveals not a search interface but a rather lame explanation of how to download titles from the Amazon site. Inexplicably, clicking on the link in this screen takes you not to an iPhone-optimized version of Amazon.com but to the full home page. I have a first generation iPhone (which you can pry out of my cold, dead fingers thank you very much), so accessing Amazon.com over Edge is no picnic. I know Amazon has a great mobile interface, why not link to it from the application? Presumably, most Kindle for iPhone users can be assumed to be using iPhones, right?

I ending up downloading a title from my MacBook Pro instead, which was much easier. I used my existing Amazon.com account which I have been more and more frequently using to download music, and hit the one-click button. Seconds later I refreshed my Kindle for iPhone app and my title downloaded automatically. I was reading in seconds.

Complaints Only a Designer Would Notice (or care about)

The Kindle for iPhone interface icon tries way too hard to make the “kid reading under the tree” silhouette play nice with the Amazon logo, which kind of runs awkwardly across the top. Simplify.

Although there are five different settings for type size, Left Justify is the only available setting that I was able to find for the layout of the text. To someone who looks at type all day, I find Left Justify extraordinarily hard to read. Left Justification when done improperly, or left to the the whims of a computer without hyphentation forms “rivers” which are awkward white space gaps in the line of text. Maybe it’s just the typographer in me, but a simple way to toggle between Left Justified and Left alignment would make reading easier on my eyes.

Conclusion

Kindle for iPhone does a great job of being an iPhone e-reader. You have to give Amazon a hand for realizing the potential of the iPhone to do this. I think I read today that there are 20 million existing iPhone handsets in service. For people like me, who were half-heartedly considering a Kindle but couldn’t justify the cost, Amazon gets me as a customer where no customer previously existed. Multiply that by the millions of others who shelled out for, and love, their iPhones but couldn’t justify the purchase of an e-reader.

I think the Kindle for iPhone application suffers from a lack of an easily accessible, iPhone-friendly version of the Kindle Store, but I’m willing to use the existing site until such a store develops.

The Symptoms:

A couple of days ago my first generation iPhone stopped producing audio out of the built-in ear piece, or picking up audio out of the built-in microphone. I could make and receive calls, but there was no sound either on my end or the other end of the call. SMS worked normally. So did all other functions including Safari.

The Problem:

The iPhone has a sensor in the headphone jack that is aware of wether or not headphones are plugged in. It’s what tells the phone to turn off the built in earpiece and microphone so that the earbuds can be used. This sensor, I’ve found, is sensitive to dust and dirt and needs to be cleaned every so often. If it’s not clean it can get confused (for lack of a better word) and think that headphones are plugged in when they are not.

Testing to see if this is your problem:

This article helped me diagnose the problem. The easiest way to tell if your phone “thinks” an empty headphone jack has something plugged into it is use the controls on the side of the phone to turn the volume up and down. If the word “headphones” appears under the volume icon, and you have nothing plugged in you have the same issue I did.

(Incidentally: this is the second time I have had this issue. The first time it was because something had gone seriously wrong with my iPhone and it was accompanied by a warning message that said something like (I’m paraphrasing) “This device is not approved for use with iPhone.” This warning appeared every fifteen minutes or so, and the phone was otherwise functional. Still, there was nothing I could do to make the error message stop appearing and I ultimately had to take the phone to the “Genius Bar”:http://www.apple.com/retail/geniusbar/ and have it replaced.)

How to fix it:

You need a cotton swab, scissors and rubbing alcohol. If you’re not comfortable sticking a wet cotten swab into your headphone jack, you should probably skip the rubbing alcohol. I used it and it worked fine for me. A cotton swab is too thick on the tip to fit into the headphone jack, and you don’t want to run the risk of leaving errant cotton threads inside your phone. Use the scissors to cut the cotton swab in half. Dampen the cut edge of one of the halves and use this end to clean out the headphone jack of your iPhone. You’ll probably be surprised at how much grime (relatively) you’ll clean out. 

You should be able to tell immediately if it worked because the volume control will no longer have the word “headphones” on the volume display, but make a call anyway and see if you can hear anything through the built in ear piece.

This is not my trick. I found it many moons ago during the first (abortive) attempt to fix this problem. Many relevant articles exist on the ‘net that discuss the technique I used of which, this message thread is an example.