Amazon have just announced a new firmware update for the Kindle, which has a couple of new features.  The first, and potentially in response to the Barnes & Noble Nook, is support for PDF files.  Now, anything too complicated won’t really work, and, although you can rotate it into landscape mode, there’s no zoom, so some PDF files will still be unreadable (and for them we still recommend Calibre to sort out your conversion into the native Kindle format for better reading).

The second though, is even more interesting, especially in the UK; they have announced that you can extend the battery life by as much as 85% (offering up to 1 week), although you can extend this even further (to nearly 2 weeks) by turning off the wireless support.  Remember in the UK, there are additional charges for using wireless (to download ebooks which is built into the price), and until they offer full browsing next year, the only accessible website is Wikipedia (see here for more information).

This update should appear automatically via the wireless connection shortly, if it hasn’t already.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 26th, 2009 at 11:09 am and is filed under Gadgets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.