Kindle Classic Review

The Kin­dle Clas­sic aka The Kin­dle 4

Why on Earth…

I have to admit, I didn’t read much until recently. The only stuff I ever read were school books so that I could, you know, get along and pass my courses. So a while back, I heard the Steve Jobs auto­bi­og­ra­phy was com­ing out. I was fas­ci­nated by the man so I decided I wanted to read the book. Prob­lem was, the thought of adding another book to my fairly large col­lec­tion given the lim­ited space I have seemed like a drag. So I started to look for alter­na­tives. The obvi­ous option was to buy the ebook on Ama­zon and read it in the Kin­dle apps on either my phone, iPod, iPad or com­puter. Sim­ple. Not so much.

You see, I had tried to do the same before. I have sev­eral lengthy research papers in PDF for­mat that I’ve had to read before – this proved to be a night­mare and I ended up print­ing them out for read­ing. My biggest issue: glare. I just can’t stand it! It’s OK to be in front of a com­puter screen (or any back­lit screen) for 1 or 2 hours at a time, but when you have to spend say 5 hours straight? Night­mare. Pro­gram­ming or doing other tasks is dif­fer­ent. You have the oppor­tu­nity to look all over the screen and occa­sion­ally look away to think. When read­ing you’re star­ing at about the same spot, scrolling and all – not cool. So I decided to get a Kindle.

Overview

I decided to get the clas­sic Kin­dle. I will admit, at first I thought I would buy it then sell it to get the Kin­dle Touch but it turns out, this is the bet­ter one for me.

The Kin­dle clas­sic is bet­ter than the other touch vari­ants for sev­eral rea­sons. First off, because it lacks touch sen­sors and speak­ers, it’s the light­est and thinnest of the the ebook read­ers out there. The screen is also not as ‘deep’ as the oth­ers because it lacks touch, which means that there isn’t much of a shadow cast on the screen when you’re read­ing under a light. Such things are impor­tant since the Kin­dle lacks a backlight.

Reviews have shown that the Kin­dle Clas­sic is also faster than the other touch screen read­ers or at least as fast. The other read­ers just don’t seem to be as respon­sive. This could be attrib­uted to the touch screen tech­nol­ogy or just poor soft­ware though. The Kin­dle Touch lacks phys­i­cal page turn but­tons, in fact it has only a home but­ton and power but­ton. This means you have to touch the screen (at spe­cific oddly cho­sen areas mind you) to turn the pages. Although I haven’t used the touch screen, many oth­ers who have find the phys­i­cal but­tons on the Kin­dle Clas­sic bet­ter than the touch con­trols. I per­son­ally think they are awe­some; not that the screen would smudge or any­thing (it doesn’t because of the matte fin­ish) but the tac­tile feed­back and the quick response are satisfying.

The beauty of it

I was against ebook read­ers a short while back. I thought they were point­less, slug­gish, back­ward and gim­micky. The idea of this mono­chrome, slow-responding, sin­gle pur­pose device seemed ridicu­lous to me. I thought it was one of those things that was just going to pass. Those ideas started to change when I tried to do some seri­ous read­ing on my iPad. I just couldn’t stay focused. I found myself get­ting eas­ily dis­tracted. Besides the eye strain, I would get all sorts of noti­fi­ca­tions or I would just start think­ing about play­ing Infin­ity Blade or Sparkle or some­thing. There’s just so much that can be done on the iPad. That, cou­pled with the eye strain just left me with heaps of stuff half read.
That’s when I realised the poten­tial of these ebook readers…and I was right. There’s not much you can do on the Kin­dle, espe­cially the Kin­dle Clas­sic. With no touch screen, even the things you can do are a pain. For instance, the Kin­dle has a built in ‘exper­i­men­tal’ browser, but with­out a touch screen and with the e-ink screen, I have to say, it’s one of the worst browsers I’ve ever used in my life. I won’t even get into the ridicu­lously slow process of text input. The only thing this device is good for is read­ing books. That’s it. And that’s awesome!

When I’m using the Kin­dle, my mind is clear, it’s just me and the book. The thoughts of check­ing my mail or brows­ing the web or play­ing a game are all thwarted by the pain of the thought of try­ing to do any­thing other than read­ing the book. There’s this purity to it that I just love.

The Kin­dle has rekin­dled my inter­est in read­ing. I’ve always been fas­ci­nated by all sorts of facts, peo­ple, events, tech­niques etc. but it had been a while since I had gone out to look for books the cover these inter­ests. The Kin­dle has helped me redis­cover the wonder.

The bad

That’s the good stuff. There’s really not much I don’t like about the Kin­dle but I will list a few things that could be better…or wishes rather.

1. The screen res­o­lu­tion is pretty low. It would be nice if it were sharper than 600x800 (@167 ppi). Ide­ally it should be close to the iPhone/iPod Touch Retina ppi of 326. That would be awe­some! The text is quite alright though, I rarely ever notice the pix­e­la­tion of text anyway.
2. Expand­able mem­ory would also be nice but so far the built in 2GB is more than enough for me. Each book is usu­ally a few hun­dred KBs any­way and you don’t really want to be stuff­ing any­thing other than books in it so yeah.
3. ePub sup­port would be nice too. That way I could buy books from other stores or some­thing and just load them with­out con­vert­ing. On the other hand the Ama­zon store has the largest col­lec­tion I believe and they have the best prices anyway.

Kin­dle Clas­sic PDF read­ing (my project report!)

In con­clu­sion

I love this Kin­dle, it’s the best piece of kit I’ve bought in a while. It’s not for every­one though. If you want to take notes and lis­ten to audio books or music, then the Kin­dle Touch is the bet­ter option. The other touch read­ers by Kobo and Sony are also alright accord­ing to the reviews float­ing around. You may also want con­sider the older Kin­dle Key­board if you’re big on but­tons and the form fac­tor. Oth­er­wise, if you just want the raw basics in a slim, light pack­age with a few but­tons – you can’t go wrong with the Kin­dle Classic.