The Kindle Paperwhite - A gadget for serious readers

The kindle

If there is one gadget that today’s kids could benefit from getting spoilt with, it would definitely have to be the Kindle Paperwhite.

The Kindle Paperwhite is a brilliant piece of technology for all those book lovers who hate to have to carry stacks of books along with them wherever they go. It is a true delight for people who are constantly on the move and who love to read as it integrates their collections into one single beautiful device. This is one piece of technology that makes one feel the same experience as that felt when reading a real book. Most of all, the Kindle Paperwhite is for people who actually read their books.

The kindle is an impressive device which can absorb you into it not just by the engrossing nature of a book, but also due to the brilliant reading experience it offers. Simple yet amazing as it is, the Paperwhite is sure to make all those old-style book lovers to fall in love with eBooks. Its sleek finish and amazing weightlessness is a godsend for those many who find it hard to handle a fat book when reading while lying down in a bed. Though many reviews report it to be too big for the palm, its sleek finish allows one to easily hold it from the bottom edge while reading which makes for effortless handling. Moreover, the device is as close as one can get to the page size of a standard book.

Note- How good the actual reading quality is despite the poor picture quality of my 2 MP phone camera

The Paperwhite offers some incredibly amazing options to enhance one’s reading experience while maintaining the feel of a physical book alive throughout. By the flip of a finger, one can roll through a gamut of books uploaded from one’s computer or bought from Amazon. The device is integrated with two dictionaries either of which can be accessed while reading a book. This one simple feature I must say is one that I have found most helpful among all others. One is saved of the effort and the distraction caused in having to pause and look up on to a dictionary for the meaning of a word while in the middle of reading a book. One simply has to highlight a word to know its meaning.

The kindle also offers a feature where if one where to start reading a half finished book after a long time, she can get recapitulated of the characters and their relation to the plot without having to read the book all over again. However, this helpful feature requires access to a wifi internet connection.

The additional reading features include among many the ability to change font styles/sizes, to change page indents, to highlight words/sentences, to add notes, and a vocabulary builder which helps enhance our stock knowledge of words. Unlike the earlier versions of the Kindle, the Paperwhite loads pages in no time. The battery life is unbelievably good and can last for days together if the wifi is turned off.

Apart from Amazon’s own .mobi format, the kindle supports pdf files although many features are rendered unavailable when using this format. The kindle is best suited for mobi files and sadly does not support epub files.

Ultimately, the kindle is for dedicated readers and should be purchased after being given due thought by its to-be users. The experience the Paperwhite offers is very real and you truly need to have one in order to appreciate it. If there is one gadget that today’s kids could benefit from getting spoilt with, it would definitely have to be the Kindle Paperwhite.

A Review Of Kamal Hassan's Latest Movie Papanasam

Kamal Hassan’s latest release is about the story of Suyambulingam (Kamal Hassan), an uneducated man running a business of a cable TV operator in the small town of Papanasam.

Unlike most Hollywood thrillers which often represent the protagonist trying to conceal a crime as being a retired CIA agent or a former Hitman from the feared Mafioso, Suyumbulingam is a simple, uneducated man who grew up in poverty as an orphaned child, but who eventually found success in life due to his hard work.

His worldview, or the perspective from which he views life, comes entirely from his sole source of knowledge, the movies. Having designating most of the daily work to his assistant, he now sits casually in his office and does the accounting of the money collected daily from individual houses which receive his cable services for television viewing. Idling away in his office Suyambu spends his time watching movies on TV throughout the day. He considers them a great source of knowledge, and ultimately it is the wisdom he gains from having watched a multitude of crime and thriller movies that help him to clear and conceal all evidences of a murder and to also train his family in the art of covering up a crime.

The oft spoken fact of how bombs can be made at home through the use of simple Google searches also extends to how crimes can be shrouded through basic knowledge obtained from viewing movies. Modern cinema has made the probing of a crime far more complex for crime investigators by making a large part of the initial investigative process commonly known.

The strength of what I say can be better understood if one tries to think from the shoes of a Suyambulingam trying to hide a crime in order to save his family. The ethical dilemma that inevitably arises in the course of scheming such an act is another point worth reflecting upon.

All in all, Papanasam is in my opinion the most thought provoking Kamal Hassan movie I have seen since Anbe Sivam (2003). But unlike Anbe Sivam which was Written and Directed by Hassan himself, credit for Papanasam goes to Writer Director Jeethu Joseph who decided to remake this movie after its earlier success in Malayalam in 2013 when it was released as Drishyam starring the veteran actor Mohanlal. Through Papanasam, Jeetu has crafted a simple yet strong and powerful story which at the end raises many questions in the viewers mind.