Kindle 3
- It’s so thin and light, you’d expect to easily break it at first. But the casing is actually very sturdy.
- Page refreshes are fast. With this and the excellent page-turning buttons, you’d have a hard time turning a printed page half as fast as that.
- Resolution is impressive. In portrait orientation, testing with an almost-a4 journal article displayed full-page (ie at less than 25% zoom), I could still read even the figure captions.
- Switching portrait to landscape mode requires up to eight clicks (in the reader, when there are many active options to jump past). The menu interface is awkward like that in more than one place. At least it’s pretty responsive.
- Connect it to your PC over USB, and it shows up as a mass storage device, no nonsense. Couldn’t be better.
- Try connecting it to your PC over Wifi (say, to share your PCs 3G connection), and it will tell you it doesn’t grok ad-hoc networking.
- The graphite casing makes for a rather hard edge-contrast, I’m not sure this was a wise choice. Of course the white version might have shown more fingerprints.
- Once you really start reading, none of the above matters.
