Amazon Kindle

Amazon Kindle is one of the most famous brand of eReaders. The reason for their popularity for me at least is hiding in the popularity of their site. Amazon.com is a name in the book industry (and not only), so it makes sense consumers to trust them when it comes to books. And the new Kindle is one of the best pieces of hardware when it comes to quality vs. price.

From historical point of view, there are 3 series of Kindle starting from 2007, but we’ll review only the last one, Kindle 3. Officially there are two lines Kindle and Kindle DX, while some consider the last Kindle released 2010 to be part of the third line – Kindle 3.

The differences between the 2 main lines are that Kindle DX offers bigger screen and is more suitable for readins newspapers or textbooks (there is a huge problem reading textbooks on smaller screens, especially if you want to read formulas). All of the editions are with normal E Ink screen, meaning they do not offer “touch” functionality.

The last Kindles offer wireless downloading of books trough Wi-Fi or Amazon’s 3G “Whispernet” network – a free network accessible even without wireless subscription. With the last line, Amazon introduced also Kindle software allowing ebooks to be read on different devices and/or OS – MS Windows, Mac OSx, Android, BlackBerry and more.

Interesting detail is that the OS of Kindle is Linux. Which means that, of course, it can be modified to suit people’s needs.

For me, Amazon Kindle is the best buy of the season if it comes to low price without compromise in the high quality. It does precisely what it claims to do – show you books. And it shows it well. Both versions. It has also Internet (for me the Wi Fi is the better option), it can browse websites, also it includes Voice reading of books which can be turned on and off easily keeping the progress in the book. Generally, this is a good piece of device. The only problems I see with it is that it ships from the USA, which makes it more problematic for International downloads. And that it doesn’t have a touchscreen.

Supported files: Kindle (AZW), TXT, PDF, Audible (Audible Enhanced (AA, AAX)), MP3, unprotected MOBI, PRC; HTML, DOC, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP.