Amazon Kindle 3 review

Follow this link if you’re looking for the new keyboard-less Amazon Kindle 4 (2011).

After its dalliance with providing the Kindle from an International store, Amazon has decided that for its latest model it will ship a UK-specific model. While that’s of interest in itself, it’s perhaps the price that’s the most astonishing thing: the 3G model (WiFi is also included) here is just £149, but those on a tighter budget can buy the WiFi-only model for just £109.

If you think that corners have been cut to get the price down, you’d be wrong. While the third generation Kindle is made from plastic, it feels incredibly well-built. At 247g, it’s both light enough to carry everywhere, but heavy enough to feel tough.

Even so, we recommend buying a carry case to protect the screen. There are two official versions available: the standard leather ones cost £30, while the case with the built-in light that’s powered by the Kindle costs £50.

The 6in screen is fantastic. It has a resolution of 600×800 pixels, making text look sharp. It’s the new E Ink Pearl screen, with 16-levels of greyscale an better contrast, so reading in any condition is simple. While Sony has decided to fit its latest Readers, such as the PRS-650, with touchscreen displays, Amazon has stuck with a standard screen and regular control buttons.

In practice this makes very little difference to use. Page-turn buttons are located on both sides of the screen for left- and right-handed people. They’re perfectly positioned, and turning pages is quick thanks to the responsive screen.

Underneath there’s a standard keyboard, which you can use to enter notes on books, search for text and, most importantly search the Kindle store. This is the real beauty of the Kindle: the integrated store. Directly from the device you can download new books and pay for them through the associated Amazon account.

The number of books has dramatically increased and the Kindle store is the best-stocked of any eBook store. Prices are fantastic, too, with most books costing a lot less than their real paper equivalents and some true bargains on offer.

With the 3G version you get free access to the store from anywhere in the world, so you can buy books while lazing on the beach on holiday. With the WiFi-only version you’ll need to be connected to a hotspot, but it’s not too much hassle to sort out your holiday reading before you jet off.

While the Amazon store has tons of choice, if you want to read free books or PDFs you have a choice of ways to get them on to the device. Unfortunately, the popular ePub format is not supported, but free collections, such as Project Gutenberg, have the books available in the Kindle-supported MOBI format.

Once you have the files you can either email them to your Kindle-specific email address, in which case they appear on your device or go the old-fashioned route and use a USB cable to connect the eReader to your PC and drag-and-drop files.

If the file types you want to read are listed as not having native support, such as HTML, you have to use the email method, which also puts them through a conversion process. It’s a fairly painless process and is pretty quick.

We found that all of the books we bought from the Amazon store were perfectly formatted to fit the Kindle’s screen. PDF viewing was mostly successful, but the Kindle can only zoom in to the content, it can’t increase font size and reflow text. If you’re trying to read the PDF of a book, it can mean that you’ve either got too-small a font or you have to scroll around the screen. If you want to read a lot of PDF files, Sony’s Readers are far more elegant in their text handling.

Text-to-voice conversion will read pages out to you, but it’s a little bit odd having the computerised voice blaring out of the loud rear speakers. Audio on this device is better suited to Audible spoken-word books, although you may just prefer to use an MP3 player for this instead.

Sony’s new touchscreen readers are arguably more elegant in the way that they handle documents, and their interfaces a little nicer. However, the Kindle is superb value and the store is the best you can get. For pure reading of books, then, the Kindle is the best reader to buy.