Amazon listens!

OMG! Complaining works! Only a couple of days after I bitch about the unsolicited ads taking space up on the Kindle Fire's home page, Amazon comes out with a software update which changes this!*     :-)

From this page:
The software update will include:
[...] A setting so customers can control whether or not personalized recommendations appear below the carousel on the device homepage.

Excellent. I guess it goes to show that it's harder to sneak things by the modern audiences. The loudness of bloggers helps too, I'm sure. Freedom of speech rock, seriously.

I dunno, though, I think I will have to be very careful with this awesome power... imagine I suggested an iPad made out of chocolate, and Apple actually built one, and went bankrupt! Ooooh, the responsibility. Apple! Listen! I am not serious about a chocolate iPad! It would make me sick, too big. Make it a chocolate iPhone instead, just the right size for a snack. Oh, and it should cost no more than $199, please.

There is also an update to the Paperwhite.
It includes improved fonts, again removal of ads on the home page (though I'm not sure I remember seeing any) (Aha, that's because I use List View. In cover view, the ads were there!), and better handling of samples. Finally, after five years, the device will recognize how far you've read into the sample and set the purchased book after that, and will also delete the old sample after you buy the book. I guess this must have been surprisingly hard to implement, because it's been one of the obvious weaknesses since Kindle One, and I guess a reason many people have not used samples, too much bother.

Update:
No matter what size I look at, I can't see any difference in the fonts after the update. It must be quite subtle changes. But I guess you can't blame Amazon for promoting it anyway, every little bit helps. (In the photos, the left Paperwhite is updated.)

What I do see though, is the difference in samples. My UK-bought Paperwhite has a slightly more uneven display compared to my US-bought one, but on the other hand it's noticeably brighter, and has a cooler tint. Maybe I'll start using that one as my main one.

Wow, you can really see on these picture how uneven the light is, compared to a good LCD display. It is much more apparent in the photos for some reason, they don't look this bad in life, but you sort of feel it anyway, and it shows there's room for improvement in this technology yet. Not to take anything away from Amazon's excellent accomplishment in developing this amazing lighting method, which is the best anybody has done yet, I believe. It's a big step up from anything we had before.

(You can't photograph the displays this close to each other, of course, but I had the Kindles next to each other in the same photo, and removed the broad black part from the middle later, to get better comparison.)


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*But weirdly, it doesn't replace the ads with anything, like Favorites, now the space is just wasted, black space. Let's hope they were just in a hurry, and next update will allow something useful to occupy this space. 'Cuz I couldn't find any setting to remedy this.