SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Amazon has made its premium Kindle Oasis e-reader an inch larger and given the device an IPX8 waterproof rating (in this case, immersion in up to 2 meters of fresh water for up to 60 minutes):
Amazon has been selling Kindles for 10 years now, but "waterproof" hasn't appear on its list of incremental technological advancements until now. The company just announced a new version of its popular e-reader that builds on last year's Kindle design and now has an IPX8 waterproof rating.
The new Kindle Oasis — the same name as last year's premium Kindle — has jumped up in size, moving from a 6-inch screen to a 7-inch screen. It has an aluminum back, which gives it a more premium look and feel than the Kindles with soft-touch plastic.
It supports AZW, TXT, PDF, MOBI, and PRC, but lacks EPUB support. Storage starts at 8 GB ($249) but there is a 32 GB option. Amazon has brought back physical buttons for page turning as an alternative to the touchscreen, and comes with an accelerometer to automatically change page orientation.
Still no color e-ink.
What's that book to the right of The Hobbit? Does it support that book?
Also at CNET and TechCrunch.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 12 2017, @05:55PM (4 children)
> an accelerometer to automatically change page orientation.
This drives me nuts, I want to be able to lay on my side and have the display look upright relative to my eyes...not upright relative to the center of the earth (accelerometer).
Other reasons too (no epub for one).
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Thursday October 12 2017, @06:20PM (1 child)
Yeah, I really hate that too on my phone. I hate that it's not configurable too. It is possible to disable accelerometer-based rotation altogether and just lock everything in portrait mode, but I don't want that either. I want my phone to *only* switch to landscape mode when I'm looking at a photo that's in landscape mode, or if I'm using the camera in landscape orientation. That's it. There is no other time where it makes any sense to use landscape mode on a phone (except maybe some games that I don't play). I don't want it when I'm texting, or using GPS navigation, or talking on a phone call, or playing one of my simple games, or anything else. Why can't I disable this damned landscape crap except for the camera/photo use-cases where it actually makes a lot of sense? Am I the only person who thinks this way?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 13 2017, @07:56PM
Your phone? That's the catch, you just carry it and paid a buying price for it. But it's still their phone as you can see.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday October 12 2017, @06:47PM (1 child)
Like Grishnakh said, phones have options to disable automatic orientation, but I have not seen an option that locks it into the current orientation instead of just portrait mode. Maybe we haven't looked hard enough?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by t-3 on Thursday October 12 2017, @09:43PM
My phone has a rotation lock setting that will lock the phone into whatever the current orientation is (except for some apps that demand a certain orientation, those are always whatever they are).