Kindle for iPhone App Review

On March 3, 2009 Apple pushed the Amazon Kindle Application for iPhone out the door. This application will be a great boon for the e-book market.

Being a Kindle 2 owner, I decided to install the application. The registering of your iPhone with your Amazon Kindle account is a snap. All you have to do is start up the application and enter in your Amazon e-mail address and password.

Immediately when you login your iPhone or iPod Touch will be registered, much like mine has been, shown here.

From this page you can ‘deregister’ (a better term would be unregister) either your Kindle or you iPhone / iPod Touch. You can also deregister your iPhone / iPod touch directly from the device.

Once you login you are presented with all of the items that you have in your archive, meaning the items that you have purchased from Amazon and not the items that you may have uploaded to your Kindle via USB.

Once you download your archived items again, it doesn’t cost you anything since you’re using your own bandwidth, you can begin reading. If you have already begun reading a book on another Kindle enabled device, you will be presented with the option of synchronizing the two with the latest point. This information is maintained by Amazon and is synced up, as long as your two devices have an active network connection. As shown below.

Despite being another outlet for Kindle readers, there are a couple of problems with the application and the lack of features.

The first of which is that there is no way to sync offline content with your iPhone or iPod touch. Yes, I’m sure if you have jail-broken your iPhone it’s only a matter of time before you’re able to run a jail-broken version of the Kindle application and will be able to put anything you want on the iPhone or iPod touch. For us legitimate users, there’s no way to do this.

The second possibly pitfall is that there is no way to shop the Kindle store. Yes, I understand that you can do this via Safari web browser, but you should be able to do this via the iPhone application, just like on the actual Kindle. This is Amazon’s thought on ‘How to Get books’.

I understand it’s a 1.0 application and can only hope that they end up adding more features to an application. I hope they do continue support and development in order to provide us Kindle users with better options.

Overall it’s a good application for those who are on the fence about buying a Kindle and do not want to plunk down $360 to go ahead and buy an actual Kindle. The download is free and is available from the Apple App Store. Give it a try, and if you don’t like it, so be it. There are definitely a bunch of free books that you can download so it’s not like it’s going to cost you anything. It is currently only available in the United States, just like the everything else related to the Kindle.