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You might think what on earth is an ebook doing on a smartbook site. Well the third incarnation of Amazon's ebook the Kindle, with its £150 price tag, its free 3G internet connectivity (via Vodafone), and its webkit web browser, places the Kindle definitely in the smartbook category.
Here are some first impressions of the Kindle...
The browser can be found in the Experimental menu on the Kindle, and as such it is one of the lesser known features of the Kindle.
The browser is fast, even with 3G or GPRS connectivity, although wifi is provided too.
The browser is intuitive. The Kindle is not a touchscreen device but in some ways this is a good thing. The arrow keys make for accurate browsing and link selection, more so than a touch interface of the iPhone or iPad, since with a touch interface it is easy to mistakenly click on the wrong link, and grease or smudge up your reading area.
The browser can be configured to change orientation, e.g. from portrait to landscape mode, and zoom levels can also be set.
Web pages are displayed in greyscale mode. This can sometimes cause issues on websites that haven't considered the implications of this, e.g. different colours which have good contrast when displayed in colour, might not have such good contrast when converted to greyscale. Generally darker websites, websites with darker backgrounds don't read as well as black text on white background websites.
There is no Flash, and you wont be watching movies on it. Animated gifs do not even animated. But the browser supports Javascript.
We finally have a web browser we can use outside!
The browser can be used not only as a read only device, but also to input information, although you wouldn't want to write a novel using the keyboard, so predominantly it is a read only device (say 80% read 20% write). But it means you can still email using web-based email services.
The battery life is great.
There is a cheaper non 3G version of the Kindle with just wifi retailing around £111, but for the free 3G in the 3G version, free 3G worldwide, the 3G version offers an amazing deal.
To conclude, the Kindle 3G is probably the nearest device we have in UK to a successful implementation of a smartbook device, although the keyboard will mean that you wont be using this device to write your novel.
Amazon Kinde 3G Review by Paul Ireland, 13 Feb 2011
This article is copyright Abstract Worlds Ltd 2011 - you do not have permission to reproduce, or cut or paste, this article onto any other website, forum or any other electronic or printed media.
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