If you haven’t heard of the Amazon Kindle before then you’re in for a bit of a surprise. The kindle is an eBook reader made by Amazon (of amazon.com fame) and the concept behind it is to have your literature loaded onto this device so you can read it anywhere.
If you think this sounds a bit like an iPad you’re not mistaken except for the fact that the Amazon kindle pre-dates the iPad by several years and Amazon has taken a very different path with their screen.
Paddy says that the screen is the most impressive part for him. It’s a high res black and white screen that looks like no other display we’ve ever seen. The displayed text and images actually look and ‘feel’ like a printed page. You can easily read the screen in direct sunlight, but because it is not back-lit you will need a book light if you want to read it at night.
There are still large buttons that let you turn the virtual pages. Where the old Kindles had a hard keyboard, the new Kindles use a touch screen and a virtual keyboard. While there are still hard cursor buttons under the screen we’re betting you won’t use them much.
Each Kindle owner has an email account allocated to them by Amazon and when you want to load on a new book you just email it to your kindle email account.
You can also just plug in the USB cable and transfer your eBooks to and from a PC or Mac.
The Kindle has an experimental web browser that lets you browse the Internet from a kindle via 3G or WiFi connection.
While Amazon say the browser is experimental it did a very good job displaying the website we tested although it did seem to show some blur on a couple of very fancy websites.
Paddy recommends the WiFi enabled kindle because he says you can easily load eBooks onto the kindle when you are at home and read them on the road when you don’t have a WiFi connection. He says the 3G would be only good for people who want to buy new eBooks on the road and couldn’t wait until the next wifi cafe.
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