Quick Review of Amazon Kindle 3G (plus some images and microscope images)
I recently ordered an Amazon Kindle 3G as I wanted an ebook reader to read papers and some of CommonsWare’s great android books and the kindle seemed like excellent value for money. It arrived today so here is a quick review along with some pictures:
Advantages
- Cost – Only ~£150
- 3G – Free browsing web over 3G (worldwide!)
- Wifi – For quicker browsing / downloading, works well no hitches.
- MP3 Player – With speakers or headphone socket
- Text to speech – So you don’t even have to read your ebooks any more, it even turns the page for you! The voice is quite good sounding only partially robotic; It manages pauses well with brackets, commas, etc. but sometimes doesn’t pause properly between paragraphs. Also some obscure words are mispronounced. I don’t know how good this would be for reading fiction as an audio book but this isn’t likely a feature I will be using much.
- Viewing angle – due to the technology of the screen (E ink), you can still see the screen irrespective of angle (unless view is physically obscured obviously…)
- – Screen is visible in direct sunlight unlike AMOLED phone screens
- Supported formats – Supports MOBI (kindle), PDF, EPUB
- Fits in my pocket – Just about fits in my pocket, with only a bit sticking out, this would obviously not be suited for long distance but as temporary holding place it is just fine.
Disadvantages
- White is grey – Okay so the background is not completely white, more greyish, but I don’t really care it is still very book-like.
- Scientific papers – Two column journal papers are a bit awkward to read or navigate using the current zoom settings
Neutral
- You could fit about 26,000 into a olymic sized swimming pool
Photos
Newspapers
There is a choice of which country you’d like to view newspapers from and in the UK there is a choice of 5 (Telegraph, daily mail, independent, financial times, and London evening standard notably the Times is missing… what are they playing at?) all of which offer a 2 week free trial of the newspaper or the purchasing of single issues or a monthly subscription (prices vary).
Microscope images
And as usual when I buy something new and exciting I have to look at it under a microscope 🙂