Review. Review on Amazon Kindle Touch

The Amazon Kindle Touch.

Most of my electronic stuff is either black or white but my favourite is a grey one.

The all grey Kindle touch. Literally even the screen background. The screen colour appears to change from slightly off -grey white in bright sunlight to a darker off- grey white in low light.

The Body.

It’s an absolute beauty to look at and use. The screen is set about 2 mm deep into the device. This depth is surrounded by a black border enclosing infrared sensors. The rest of the front face is grey bordered non-reflective slightly matt finished plastic. The back is enclosed in a comfortably gripy rubber feel plastic material.

There is a single home button on the front. It is designed as 4 small black strips which press down together at the same time. In pics or video it appears like a grill.

There a 2 speaker grills on the bottom of the backside. The bottom border of the touch has a micro USB slot, a 3.5mm audio slot and a stiff power / sleep button. The display is crystal clear even in harsh sunlight. Since the screen is not back light you need ambient light to read in low light conditions.

Kindle come with The New Oxford American Dictionary & Oxford Dictionary of English and it can also be password protected.

The Screen.

The Touch is all about its electronic ink Infra red touch screen. You can swipe left – right or up – down to move pages on the home screen. While reading a book, touching the screen along the left border moves you back to the last read page. Touching the screen along the top border brings up menu bars on top and bottom of the screen. Touching the rest of the available space moves you forward to the next page. The infra red enabled touch is so sensitive that simply hovering your finger 1 mm above the screen can sometimes turn your page.

Everything about the reading area is customizable. The fonts, typeface, words per line, line spacing’s, adding notes & bookmarks, Text to speech, Going to specific locations.

The Touch displays pages in a different way than tablets. Since it uses electronic ink you will see the current page morph into the next page in the actual blink of a second. This will happen for 5 pages. Then the device blackens the 5th page to morph into the 6th page. This is called page refresh. This takes place in about ½ a second.

Check Amazon Kindle Touch - Page Refresh videos on YouTube.

Storage.

The touch has 4Gb internal memory. While nearly 1Gb is locked in, you can use the rest to store books natively in Kindle AZW, Mobi, Pdf and Text formats. Use can also use Calibre software to convert Word, Html, EPub and several pic formats to Mobi format.

Charge.

It takes about 4 hours to charge and then can be used for 12 to 15 hours. Amazon provides a USB to Micro USB cable with the Touch, for charging and data transfer via computer. This device consumes power only when turning or refreshing pages and no power during static display. I usually charge the Touch with my cell phone’s micro usb charger.

Registering.

You will have to register your Kindle at the Amazon site to enable several features. These include landscape mode for some formats and enable assembling your books into collections and sync.

How to get it.

Kindle can only be ordered from Amazon via an online retailer. My Rs.10, 400 Kindle touch came via Tradus. 2 versions are available. The cheaper Rs. 7, 000 version is sponsored while the expensive non sponsored version costs Rs. 10, 000. On the sponsored version, you will have a 2 cm ads display area at the bottom of the screen when in home mode. You will also receive ads as screen savers when connected to wifi. I am not sure but the sponsored version cannot be replaced in case of manufacturing defect. You will have to pay the price difference to Amazon to replace your Kindle.

If you are an avid book reader you will love the touch. For the price of about 30 paperbacks (Rs. 10, 000) you can have a device which will hold about 3000 books, read them to you, play mp3s and browse the internet via WiFi or Wifi+3G.

If you have specific queries, leave a comment or send me a message.