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Kindle 4 review
Monday, December 12, 2011 @ 03:12 PM Author: Németh Balázs
Recently as I was getting closer to my birthday I decided to make myself happy and I buy a tablet. At least this was my first intention.
I was especially looking for an Android tablet but I read about iPads of course.
As usually when I am up to buy something I started to read reviews of tablets from all over the Internet. After I read a couple of reviews I started to feel that they have way too many features an many upgrades are about to be released on this quite new market. Frankly I don’t see where this market goes, I rather felt that vendors are shooting in the dark. I would rather have something solid.
The second thing which come to mind was that what am I really going to use it for? This was a kind of “I would love it very much but I don’t think I really need one” feeling which was obviously confusing. So I started to write down my use cases to see what my needs are.
Really, what my needs are?
- Reading books and internet articles, news
- Access my mails, mostly gmail
- Long battery life
- Small size and weight
- Possibly on low price
- At least WiFi capable
- Storage shall be either expandable or quite big
As I read the articles I noticed that I cannot have all in one device, I need to live with compromises. For example as battery life grows tablets are getting heavier and more expensive, and I still only get battery life up to 9 hours on top. Price on this level is at around 560 USD. This is not really what I want, therefore I decided to let the tablet market grow and evolve for at least one more year and we’ll see where is it headed.
This decision sounds easy and frankly it was, at least when I found Amazon’s Kindle as a candidate. I was surprised that how many of my colleagues have one. I didn’t take much time to paddle on the recent versions. (Here I’d like to say thank you for you guys.)
Why Kindle?
- Battery life lasts for a month! At this point tablet’s 9 hours are ridiculous no matter how we look at it.
- Price is at around 170 USD. Taking into account that Amazon does not have any store in Hungary and I had to buy if from over the sea (USA) this is still the quarter of the price of a decent Android tablet.
- It has WiFi and has an experimental web browser which is capable to display the most frequent sites I used to visit, though it is not designed for motion pictures as the page refresh time is really slow for movies.
Which Kindle?
My choice was the fourth generation of Kindles. Strange that isn’t got any special name given by Amazon, still it has many names. Kindle, Kindle Mini, Kindle 4, etc.
I was surprised that after I ordered it I could have it in my hands in less than three days. I don’t know what logistics Amazon has but it was quicker than if I ordered something from a store nearby.
I have it for about two weeks and I’ve just finished my first book on it, so I though I will write about my experiences.
Advantages:
As I said no device has all requirements I needed, therefore I had to make compromises.
- Weight: 170g. You’re gonna love it. It’s so light that I barely feel that it is in my hands.
- Battery life takes one month. You don’t even got a charger from Amazon but only a single USB cable which is capable to charge the device from an USB port. The total charge time is around 2 hours according to Amazon but I haven’t had the chance to test it because since I got it I never turned it off and its battery is still above 85%.
- E-ink is really good for eyes. It doesn’t have any back light, it almost looks like traditional paper.
- This is not special to Kindle but I was fascinated to be able to change the font size of the texts. As I wear glasses this was really helpful for me. Just think about it how small a letter could be as the resolution of displays grow.
- I don’t need to turn when I lay during reading. You do know what I am talking about, don’t you?
Disadvantages:
- Usable storage is only 1,3GB and it is not expandable but at least it can hold more books than I will ever read in the next 5 years.
- E-ink display does not have any back light, therefore you are forced to turn the lights on or to use a small lamp to light it if you’re reading in the bed just before you go to sleep.
- The built-in Webkit based web browser is stated as experimental which is true. It operates as a mobile browser at least from the point of user agent. Doesn’t have many features, just an address bar, action buttons, bookmarks but no tabs, no password management.
- It does not have touch screen which makes typing in the browser quite slow, though you won’t see this as a disadvantage if you just read ebooks.
There is still one disadvantage but this is absolutely not the Kindle’s fault. There are not many ebooks exist in hungarian. In fact you are mostly left to try to convert your pdf-s into a supported ebook format (and saying good bye to letters Ő and Ű). If you’re speaking english then you’ll have greater selection. Calibre is a great software to manage your ebook collections and it is capable to do this conversion for free though it is not perfect to be frankly.
One more thing to consider. As it is an ebook reader and not a tablet it only has a greyscale display, so don’t expect nice rainbow colors. I couldn’t decide whether is this an advantage or a disadvantage but I think it really helps to save battery life.
Anyway my conclusion is that I don’t mind to get this device as it is really handy. Think about carrying on War & Peace with you on a crowded bus in paper format instead of in ebook format.