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Customer Review
Reviewed in the United States on October 3, 2014
[Update 3 November 2014. It's been a month and I'm happy to report my son has frequently read using this simple Kindle. He's still reading physical books from the library, but we've purchased several books from Amazon on this device and he's quickly and happily read through them. Due to the little 'smudge' that developed on the screen, I've put this in a case, and I hope no more smudges appear. Battery life has been awesome in comparison to LED devices, and nobody has had to interrupt their reading to find a charger, and it's been fully charged maybe 3 times in a month.]
I bought this value-priced Kindle to solve a problem. My 9 year old son loves to read; he will tear through a Harry Potter book in a couple of days. But, he has no interest in reading on a regular tablet whether it be one of the iPads in the house, or the Kindle Fire HD. Something about the experience, basically staring at a white lamp for hours, keeps him from enjoying it like he enjoys traditional paper books. But paper books are bulky, and accumulate, and get kicked around the car, and have to be returned to the library. Many times, I'd just prefer to have the convenience of an eBook.
So, when this new generation of Kindle E Ink readers were announced, and at such a low price, I impulsively put in a pre-order. I could cheaply experiment to see if it was right for my son. This whole device costs less than the extended warranty on my iPad.
When it arrived, I made an error. I powered it on. One of my children asked to see it, I handed it over, and when it was handed back, it had been set to German and was midway through the tutorial you walk through to learn the basics of operating the Kindle. Now my German has been completely unlearned since I was in college, so I was at sea. I needed to call Kindle support to get me out of there. By the way, Kindle support answered my call within a minute, on a Thursday afternoon, and the pleasent man on the other end helped me get out of the tutorial, and find my way to the comforts of American English.
But I had missed the tutorial, and if there ever was a device that you need to absorb the lessons of the onboarding screens, it is this single button Kindle. It has one of the least discoverable interfaces you are likely to encounter in this modern era of app design. It's filled with secret taps in regions of the screens, and long presses to do something, and swipes other places. So it takes a while to get used to even if you've walked through the lengthy tutorial.
But, even given that, my children, both my 9 and 7 year old, immediately fell in love with this little reader. I signed up for a month of FreeTime, so there was a little book content--not enough, but enough to get a quick taste--and I soon heard one of my favorite sounds: my son chuckling at a book. And then later, my daughter who has just recently gotten seriously interested in reading, borrowed it, found in a book a demonstration of drawing the book's cartoon characters, and was happily copying them from the display onto paper. Soon after, she asked me if the Kindle could be hers.
So, I am favourably inclined towards this device. I've not been happy with Amazon's regular tablets, they have not stood up very well in my household when competing with iPads, but these E Ink single purpose devices are a different animal. By being better as a reader than a general purpose tablet: not being backlit, having ridiculously good battery life, being very lightweight, and being cheap enough that I don't have to worry too much about them breaking, they comfortably fill a niche in my family's technology needs. However, in no way is this is a replacement for a general purpose tablet. While it does have an "Experimental Browser," that is somewhat of a sad joke, slow, ugly and crashy, something you'd only find useful in an emergency. Nor is it a gaming machine, or even good for books where photographs take a big role or with odd layouts like books for young children. It has no sound input or output, so no audio books or text to speech. The screen doesn't even autorotate, although it can be put in landscape mode. This is a text reading machine. Period. But a useful one.
But not a perfect one. A perfect device would instantly refresh like an LCD or AMOLED tablet, this E Ink device takes time to change its display--perhaps a quarter of a second--making navigation a clunky experience. A perfect device would have paper-white white backgrounds, this one has a decidedly grey background: for whiter, you will have to pay more. The resolution is just low enough that you can see the pixels in the fonts; don't let this ruin it for you, read the words and not the pixels. A perfect device would have a more easy to access interface, maybe even a couple more hardware buttons, but a few hours of use will get you used to it and mostly forgetting the pain of learning. Whatever you do, spend your time learning from the onboarding tutorial.
My extended family has been tough on E Ink Kindles. One of my brothers has broken two of the older models; he had an unfortunate habit of sitting or sleeping on them. So treat this thing gently and never place it in a back pocket. Even this new one after a couple weeks of wear has developed a "smudge" about the size of a lower case a towards the bottom left side.
A perfect device would be on the Internet all the time, this one requires a Wi-Fi connection. A frequent traveler will likely find the Kindles with cellular service worth the extra upfront cost. Several years ago, I bought one of my brothers such a Kindle for when he was studying in Rome, and he used that feature all the time. This is a Wi-Fi only device and it quickly found a couple of hubs in my house, and I was able to enter my password and start downloading books from my account quickly. If needed, I could use my phone as a hotspot and get content on the go that way.
The screen has a distinctly grey tinge, and fonts are very dark grey, so the contrast is middling. There are a variety of font options: Baskerville, Caecilia, Caecilia Condensed, Futura, Helvetica, Palatino, and a "Publisher Font" which apparently allows publishers to embed their own preferred font or at least select it. Of these, Caecilia is the default and the best suited for the device's screen. It minimizes the slight waviness of straight lines caused by the limitations of the underlying E Ink technology. The combined effect is reminiscent of printing with a very good dot matrix printer (remember those?) onto fine recycled paper.
I've subscribed to FreeTime for my children on my Kindle Fire HD in the past, and eventually dropped it for lack of interest from them. I've re-activated it for this device, but unless they increase the number of books for their age brackets, I will likely drop it again. Still, it's worth trying it out for a month, and if you drop it, Amazon will refund you whatever portion is left in the month.
X-Ray is an interesting feature. I've started to read the original James Bond novel, Casino Royale, and it's interesting seeing a graph of how characters like Felix Leiter pop up, disaappear and reappear. Or a brief history of the Peugeot company. I've a feeling I won't be using this feature often, it seems like a distraction from the text, but perhaps for non-fiction it will end up being essential.
The ads on the lock screen have not been annoying and I barely notice their content.
There is no power adaptor in the box--part of the low price--but my house has dozens of USB charging ports, and it includes a decent micro-USB charging cord.
To summarize, a fine single purpose device. Hard to navigate, but as a reader, you will spend hours reading, which it is great at and seconds navigating, so the tradeoff is acceptable. I like its low low cost especially as I'm handing it off to children, but many will find the upsell to the whiter versions with cellular service worth the extra money.
I bought this value-priced Kindle to solve a problem. My 9 year old son loves to read; he will tear through a Harry Potter book in a couple of days. But, he has no interest in reading on a regular tablet whether it be one of the iPads in the house, or the Kindle Fire HD. Something about the experience, basically staring at a white lamp for hours, keeps him from enjoying it like he enjoys traditional paper books. But paper books are bulky, and accumulate, and get kicked around the car, and have to be returned to the library. Many times, I'd just prefer to have the convenience of an eBook.
So, when this new generation of Kindle E Ink readers were announced, and at such a low price, I impulsively put in a pre-order. I could cheaply experiment to see if it was right for my son. This whole device costs less than the extended warranty on my iPad.
When it arrived, I made an error. I powered it on. One of my children asked to see it, I handed it over, and when it was handed back, it had been set to German and was midway through the tutorial you walk through to learn the basics of operating the Kindle. Now my German has been completely unlearned since I was in college, so I was at sea. I needed to call Kindle support to get me out of there. By the way, Kindle support answered my call within a minute, on a Thursday afternoon, and the pleasent man on the other end helped me get out of the tutorial, and find my way to the comforts of American English.
But I had missed the tutorial, and if there ever was a device that you need to absorb the lessons of the onboarding screens, it is this single button Kindle. It has one of the least discoverable interfaces you are likely to encounter in this modern era of app design. It's filled with secret taps in regions of the screens, and long presses to do something, and swipes other places. So it takes a while to get used to even if you've walked through the lengthy tutorial.
But, even given that, my children, both my 9 and 7 year old, immediately fell in love with this little reader. I signed up for a month of FreeTime, so there was a little book content--not enough, but enough to get a quick taste--and I soon heard one of my favorite sounds: my son chuckling at a book. And then later, my daughter who has just recently gotten seriously interested in reading, borrowed it, found in a book a demonstration of drawing the book's cartoon characters, and was happily copying them from the display onto paper. Soon after, she asked me if the Kindle could be hers.
So, I am favourably inclined towards this device. I've not been happy with Amazon's regular tablets, they have not stood up very well in my household when competing with iPads, but these E Ink single purpose devices are a different animal. By being better as a reader than a general purpose tablet: not being backlit, having ridiculously good battery life, being very lightweight, and being cheap enough that I don't have to worry too much about them breaking, they comfortably fill a niche in my family's technology needs. However, in no way is this is a replacement for a general purpose tablet. While it does have an "Experimental Browser," that is somewhat of a sad joke, slow, ugly and crashy, something you'd only find useful in an emergency. Nor is it a gaming machine, or even good for books where photographs take a big role or with odd layouts like books for young children. It has no sound input or output, so no audio books or text to speech. The screen doesn't even autorotate, although it can be put in landscape mode. This is a text reading machine. Period. But a useful one.
But not a perfect one. A perfect device would instantly refresh like an LCD or AMOLED tablet, this E Ink device takes time to change its display--perhaps a quarter of a second--making navigation a clunky experience. A perfect device would have paper-white white backgrounds, this one has a decidedly grey background: for whiter, you will have to pay more. The resolution is just low enough that you can see the pixels in the fonts; don't let this ruin it for you, read the words and not the pixels. A perfect device would have a more easy to access interface, maybe even a couple more hardware buttons, but a few hours of use will get you used to it and mostly forgetting the pain of learning. Whatever you do, spend your time learning from the onboarding tutorial.
My extended family has been tough on E Ink Kindles. One of my brothers has broken two of the older models; he had an unfortunate habit of sitting or sleeping on them. So treat this thing gently and never place it in a back pocket. Even this new one after a couple weeks of wear has developed a "smudge" about the size of a lower case a towards the bottom left side.
A perfect device would be on the Internet all the time, this one requires a Wi-Fi connection. A frequent traveler will likely find the Kindles with cellular service worth the extra upfront cost. Several years ago, I bought one of my brothers such a Kindle for when he was studying in Rome, and he used that feature all the time. This is a Wi-Fi only device and it quickly found a couple of hubs in my house, and I was able to enter my password and start downloading books from my account quickly. If needed, I could use my phone as a hotspot and get content on the go that way.
The screen has a distinctly grey tinge, and fonts are very dark grey, so the contrast is middling. There are a variety of font options: Baskerville, Caecilia, Caecilia Condensed, Futura, Helvetica, Palatino, and a "Publisher Font" which apparently allows publishers to embed their own preferred font or at least select it. Of these, Caecilia is the default and the best suited for the device's screen. It minimizes the slight waviness of straight lines caused by the limitations of the underlying E Ink technology. The combined effect is reminiscent of printing with a very good dot matrix printer (remember those?) onto fine recycled paper.
I've subscribed to FreeTime for my children on my Kindle Fire HD in the past, and eventually dropped it for lack of interest from them. I've re-activated it for this device, but unless they increase the number of books for their age brackets, I will likely drop it again. Still, it's worth trying it out for a month, and if you drop it, Amazon will refund you whatever portion is left in the month.
X-Ray is an interesting feature. I've started to read the original James Bond novel, Casino Royale, and it's interesting seeing a graph of how characters like Felix Leiter pop up, disaappear and reappear. Or a brief history of the Peugeot company. I've a feeling I won't be using this feature often, it seems like a distraction from the text, but perhaps for non-fiction it will end up being essential.
The ads on the lock screen have not been annoying and I barely notice their content.
There is no power adaptor in the box--part of the low price--but my house has dozens of USB charging ports, and it includes a decent micro-USB charging cord.
To summarize, a fine single purpose device. Hard to navigate, but as a reader, you will spend hours reading, which it is great at and seconds navigating, so the tradeoff is acceptable. I like its low low cost especially as I'm handing it off to children, but many will find the upsell to the whiter versions with cellular service worth the extra money.
