Amazon Kindle Review

So I decided to break down and purchase an Amazon Kindle. The Kindle is an electronic book reader where you download books to it and read them directly from the Kindle.

I have been using my Kindle for about 2 weeks so I thought I would take the time to write a review. I must say that it took me only a few hours to totally fall in love with it.

The size is very appropriate for reading and I can read with only one hand since I use a thumb to press the next page button. It is so compact that I can take it anywhere I think I may have some free time to read, like when waiting for a hair cut, or on the train on the way to work.

The books can be wirelessly downloaded. You pay for the cost of the book, but there are no cellular/wireless fees. The Kindle uses current cell phone technology for free. You just simply look up the name of the book that you want, and click buy. Your amazon account is automatically charged for the price of the book. The majority of the books, including New York Times Best Sellers and New Releases are $9.99 or less. So this is still competitive as a regular paper back book, but the kindle can hold many of them at a time. and you can bookmark the page on each book, so that you always know where you left off. No more searching through chapters trying to find where you stopped.

In terms of actually reading off the Kindle, the one-handed reading, the overall size of the reader, the sharp text and the variable font size all work together to make the experience while reading just as easy as with a book. I used the largest font size when I had the reader propped up on the treadmill. I was never able to read a book while on the treadmill since page turning was always an issue, but I have seemed to solve that problem. When you are looking at the screen, it doesn’t feel like the normal computer screen, it was very cleverly designed to make it feel like a book page with text on it. So you don’t feel that eystrain that you do when using your PC for 4 hours.

The battery life is very good. I am able to go several days without needing to charge. Charge time is very fast, in an hour or two the Kindle gets a full charge but I can still read for an entire evening on a very low indicator.

The Kindle also plays MP3’s, so if you take your Kindle everywhere then you also have an MP3 player. There are not many playback features yet as you can only play your MP3s randomly, but I hear those are in the works on a software update.

There are also other features where you can jot notes down, sign up for subscription content such as newspapers and magazines, etc. There is one very cool feature that I found myself using quite a bit, which is called Kindle NowNow. With NowNow uou pose a question and hit submit, similiar to a google search. Within a few minutes, you start to receive responses on the Kindle. This is very cool since you can be anywhere and ask a question and get many answers all for free.

Other than the NowNow feature, I currently only use it for book reading, which is what it really was designed for. There are some differences for example if you subscribe to a newspaper, you don’t see the images or any graphics, so if are a visual person the Kindle may not be for you, but in terms of book reading, I love it.

Ok, so the Amazon Kindle is somewhat of a luxury purchase as it is close to $400, but look at it this way, I am saving money on books as some of the selections come in under what the current prices are. I am also saving storage space, since my book collection is no longer requiring more book cases to stock it. And in the end, I guess I am saving some trees right?