The Kindle (e-Reader): your best travel companion

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Mattias Geniar, May 19, 2011

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I recently went on a 2-week holiday, and for the occasion I bought myself a Kindle. The most simple version, without 3G. A basic E-reader, to replace the weight of many books I would otherwise have had to carry. And because it’s geekish enough to count as a gadget.

It is, by far, the best thing I’ve bought in the last 2 years. At least, it has the best price/gain ratio. I payed 130eur for it, including shipping from the US to get it to Belgium. And I’ve never regretted it since. From now on, I’ll be reading all my books electronically from that device.

Readability

This even outperforms a book, if you ask me. The Kindle doesn’t have a backlight (which is what makes reading on an iPad or your laptop for instance, so tiresome to your eyes), and is thus in the same league as an ordinary book: you need an exterior light to be able to read. In the dark, that means a lamp.

In the blistering sun, it remains readable. There’s no reflection on the screen, it’s exactly like a book. But since it’s pages are less white (they’re more a light gray), the bright sun doesn’t reflect that hard.

Battery life

They *claim* that the Kindle, if you disable it’s wireless feature (WiFi, not 3G), will last you a month. With 2 weeks of heavy, intensive reading (8hours+ a day), it lasted me 2 weeks and is now blinking the “please charge me” light. For normal use, I would say a month is manageable. If you’re going on a one-month-frenzy for reading, you’ll run out of juice.

Weight & Screen

The screen (6″) was less large than I had imagined, and felt rather small at first. But once you start reading, it’s exactly the right size. The light enjough to simply hold  in one hand, and quickly browse through your pages.

Absolutely useless features

For reasons I cannot yet fathom, the Kindle includes a WiFi card and the software has a built-in webbrowser as “experimantal” feature. This is supposed to be an e-reader, you won’t browse the internet with it. Cut those 2 features, and you can reduce the price even more (less hardware & less software development).

If we want to sync books with the device, we’ll just hook up a cable for 2 minutes and be good.

So damn easy

It goes in your backpack, hardly takes any weight and you have it with you all the time. With dozens of books in it (they say it holds 3000+ books). You never struggly with large books, where one side is always much more heavy than the other when you’re starting or ending the book and causes you to lose balance when reading with one hand.

You can’t build a nice home library with electronic books, but damnit it outbeats a real book any day when traveling or simply on the road. Get one. If you love reading, you’ll love an e-reader.



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