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I am thinking of buying an eBook reader as I need to travel a lot and carrying all the hard copies of my favorite books will be difficult. I was first thinking of buying the Kindle Fire, but then I saw that Kindle Keyboard and thought of buying it. I read many review of Kindle keyboard on internet and tech magazines, but never found much discussed on its performance. I wanted to know how the performance of Kindle Keyboard is; can someone tell me about it?
Kindle Keyboard has support for 3G, Wi-Fi as well as GPRS. You can download eBooks using any of these connectivity options it supports. Downloading an eBook using GPRS will take time but you can download the eBooks using 3G and Wi-Fi in short time. Another good feature of Kindle Keyboard is that it syncs many other devices like PC, Mac, iPad, iPhone, HTC smartphones and some other devices. So even if you miss your Kindle Keyboard at home, then you can continue to read your favorite eBook on any of the mentioned devices. Kindle will also sync the page till where you have read the book on these devices.
Another great feature of Kindle Keyboard is that you can load the Microsoft Word document in it and convert it into .pdf file and read it. If the eBook that you are reading has option to let you read it in various fonts of different sizes, you can switch them for your comfort. Also you can read it in any mode, portrait or landscape, whatever that is comfortable for you. This Kindle also supports marking of lines in the eBook. You can then read just the marked lines and skip reading other parts. Also Kindle Keyboard comes with in-built light which helps one to read the books in dark or in low lit area. So this won’t put stress on your eyes and you can easily read in darkness.
The interface of Kindle Keyboard is kind of old and clunky. The interface has no high end menu or animations. You will find a normal square shaped 4 way buttons that helps for navigation of eBooks that we need to select for reading. Also Kindle Keyboard has a QWERTY keypad whose keys are so tiny that people with large hands will get frustrated using them. Also the Shift key is place on the body in such a bad manner that I think if properly placed, some of its space could have been utilized to add buttons for some extra features or shortcuts.
The web browser that Kindle Keyboard has is very weak. It has no flash support and runs in resolution of 800 X 600. So this means that you will have to brose internet in grayscale that too without any fancy animations and features. Yu will just have to surf websites like Wikipedia or some other website with minimal features. So in short, the web browser is almost useless unless and until you need to go over Google or Wikipedia just to confirm certain fact or get information about some term that you must have encountered while reading. Also the web browser doesn’t go in the landscape mode and you have to keep reading in the portrait mode itself.
Kindle Keyboard also has an inbuilt MP3 player that can be used to play music while reading. It though sounds good, let me tell you that it only has pause and play next music option only. It doesn’t even indicate which song you are playing or doesn’t even provide you with any play list. The music will just go on playing and playing without any control over it. So it is like the MP3 player is next to useless as the songs will keep on playing in a pre-defined format.
I say the price over internet and saw that there is difference of $40 in Kindle Keyboard’s only 3G and 3G +Wi-Fi version. I think $40 is too high for just having Wi-Fi on our eBook reader. Also the web browser isn’t some high quality one that I will need it regularly. Also there will be paid ads in Kindle Keyboard that will be taken off if we pay some extra money. I think that Kindle Keyboard is best purchased only for 3G else the Wi-Fi version is waste of money. The synchronize feature that helps to sync the eBook with various other devices is also great and I think this is the only one feature for which I would buy Kindle Keyboard.