Kindle Apps Blog

While GMail as well as some other web-based email services work in Kindle’s basic web browser to one degree or another. Still accessing email is more frustrating experience than it should be from a device with decently sized screen, full keyboard and 3G Internet connectivity.

Therefore another application that is bound to appear is email client. Even though I have iPhone that can I can read my email on I would love to do so on Amazon Kindle because of it’s larger screen. After all if I carry it with me anyway to read books while I wait for one appointment or another why not use it as email client as well?

However there are some factors that don’t make this as easy and nice it one would wish:

1) The application will likely be subscription based since fixed-price and free applications are limited to 100 kilobytes of Internet traffic per month which is much less than average email user receives nowdays. However for those of us who do receive only few emails once in a while there may be a freeware app. Another option would be to setup filtering rules that would prevent all but email from several while-listed senders to ever reach the device.

2) While nothing is certain at this point it’s possible that Kindle SDK will prevent applications from connecting to any but standard HTTP ports and therefore whoever would distribute the app would have to come up with HTTP to POP3/IMAP/SMTP proxy service.

3) Rendering HTML emails with rich formatting might prove tricky given Kindle’s limited computing power on top of the fact that the SDK is likely java-based. While there are several ways around it – none are perfect.

4) International characters. Fonts that are installed on Amazon Kindle are limited to only Latin characters. With KDK and applications putting more strain on the limited amount of RAM that is available on the device Amazon will be even less likely to put fonts that would support broader range of characters and therefore consume more memory.

Folders is probably the most asked for Kindle feature. So with Kindle SDK out are we likely to see Kindle folders application? Right now it seems a coin toss to me.

After Kindle 2 was released internationally Amazon acknowledged the problem of organizing large libraries on the device promised a solution sometime in 2010. As I see it there are 4 options:

1) Amazon implements folders themselves. Folders can be one of the sorting options or a tab in the main screen that would most likely be accessed by tilting the 5-way controller right. Since Amazon owns the software and can integrate new features however they like it wold be easiest for them to do. So they may try to implement one-size-fits-all solution. I’m pretty sure that default home screen is going to be left intact by default so that the majority of users who are used to it will not have to change their habits.

2a) Amazon will provide a rich enough SDK that will allow developers to integrate their apps into home screen and book reading screens in a seamless and natural way (new menu items, new hot-keys, redefining existing hot keys, etc). This would allow the same experience as described in option 1 but developed by 3rd parties. So users will have more than one folders app to chose from. Multiple such applications might conflict with each other and spoil the user experience. However users will be free to chose any app or none at all. Since such seamless integration will require more complex SDK there is a chance that Amazon will not allow this kind of integration at all at least for now.

2b) Although it will not be possible to integrate folders application into home screen, Amazon will still allow applications to see filer in the “documents” folder and launch book reading application and PDF viewer. In this case folders app will be something users will have to explicitly start before they can see their library in an organized way. While this might not be too user-friendly it may end up being the only option. Lets not forget however that options 2a and 2b don’t cancel out option 1 (Amazon implementing folders themselves)

3) SDK will not allow applications to touch books at all. So folders app will be impossible to implement at all unless paired with a hack that Amazon will not likely allow.

Personally I find options 1 and 2b slightly more likely. Time will show if I’m right.