Over the holidays, I was given a Kindle Touch, something I've wanted for a while now. I've never been a big reader, but this little device might just change that. In the week or so that I've had it, it's managed to turn my attention away from the online articles I normally devour and towards books. And as a kid that grew up with somewhat less than an affinity for reading, the convenience and addictiveness of this Kindle are definitely worth praising.
Design + Hardware
Because it's a touchscreen device, the Kindle Touch can do away with all but one hardware button, leaving behind a beautiful piece of hardware. The body is 6.8" x 4.7" x 0.40". It's very thin—only a centimeter at the thickest, and it tapers off towards the edges. It weighs 7.5 ounces. The screen is an 6" e-ink display with 600x800 resolution (that's 167 ppi, for those of you not interested in deploying the Pythagorean Theorem for yourself). The screen is capable of displaying 16 levels of grayscale.
The ports on the bottom include USB micro-B (note that this isn't your standard "tiny" USB connector, so you probably don't have one, but Amazon provides one), headphone jack, and power button. A home button is on the bottom of the front of the Kindle, and other than those, it's bare. The build feels very strong, and definitely not cheap. This is a solid device.
Wi-Fi is built in, and 3G is an option (a one-time payment, without a contract, provided for life by Amazon over Sprint's network).
Performance + Reading Experience
If there's one area that sets the Kindle above all its competitors, it's where it matters most—reading. The thing that struck me most after a week of reading on the Kindle was how comfortable it was. From reading distance, the text looks sharp on the relatively low-res screen. You can easily see pixels if you look closely, but in practice, the letters look crisp and smooth. The 16 levels of grayscale are enough to make photos look real, not printed. In fact, the only times when the stuff on the Kindle's screen looks bad is when looking at too-small cover art.
The body text in ebooks on the Kindle is set in Caecilia, a professional font from Linotype. In the time I've been reading, I've found it remarkably legible. It makes it really easy to let your eyes fly over the words in books. I'm really impressed.
Thankfully, if the default layout isn't quite right, it can be customized. You can adjust the line spacing, font size, column width, and switch the font to a condensed version of Caecilia or over to sans-serif Helvetica. I'm normally the first person to adjust text settings to my liking, but after trying a bunch of different configurations, I've found that Amazon's default settings are actually the best for me.
Because it's an e-ink display, animation just doesn't work as well as an LCD display. For large changes to the screen, it will flash all black for a few milliseconds before displaying the new picture. Animations have black trails preceding and following them, so there (obviously) isn't much video viewing to be done on the Kindle. This new Kindle generation, however, does not require a full page refresh when turning pages, so the reading experience is much smoother, now that we don't have to be interrupted by flashes of black.
Features
The Kindle includes highlighting, notes, in-book dictionaries, and a new contextual feature called X-Ray on some ebooks purchased from Amazon. Also included are text-to-speech, audiobook and mp3 playback, and a web browser. It's not quite apparent if the browser includes flash (it seems to work on some sites and not others), but the screen limits its use. The browser is also somewhat crippled by its lack of support for multiple tabs or windows.
The battery takes about 4 hours to charge fully, but it lasts seemingly forever after that. Amazon rates it for 2 months with wireless off, or 6 weeks with wireless enabled. The screen is multi-touch, which is great for zooming on webpages. About 3GB of internal storage is available for user content (out of 4GB internal memory).
Unless you paid extra, the Kindle includes ads, displayed on the home screen and when the device is powered off. Ads are never displayed during reading, a very considerate feature from Amazon. They are not very intrusive, and often include codes to redeem free Amazon store credit, so paying to remove them seems to me a waste of money.
The Kindle Touch supports the following formats:
- Kindle (AZW)
- MOBI (unprotected)
- TXT
- PDF
- Audible (Audible Enhanced(AA,AAX))
- MP3
- PRC
- HTML, DOC, DOCX, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP supported through conversion
MOBI is the big one here for transferring your own ebooks. The Kindle does not support ePub, but conversion from ePub to MOBI is trivial.
Ebooks not purchased through the Kindle store must be manually transferred to the device, and are not synced between devices by Amazon. Only books bought from Amazon are synchronized in this way, but Amazon will keep track of your reading place in non-Amazon books. If you don't have multiple Kindles (or third-party ebooks), this isn't a problem. Purchased books are transferred to the device wirelessly, over Wi-Fi or 3G, depending on your Kindle.
The interface of the device is clean, simple, and very easy to use. The only complaint I have is that deleting archived items seems impossible. Web browsing, too, is very sub-par, but that's to be expected from an e-ink device. It's marked as "experimental" for good reason.
Verdict
If you're in the market for an e-reader, the Kindle Touch is almost definitely your best bet. For only $99, this new Kindle combines the fantastic reading experience of its predecessors with solid hardware and ease of use that has been greatly enhanced by the touchscreen. It's absolutely worth the extra $20 to upgrade from the non-touch version.
For what it was intended—that is, reading books—the Kindle Touch is phenomenal. Other media (magazines, newspapers, websites) don't work as well in this form factor, but there's absolutely no better way to read a book than this new Kindle.
Score: ★★★★★
Images: Amazon, Ebook Friendly, Engadget, and me. (Fair Use)
