Tag Archives: 3G

Amazon Kindle 3 Review

Remember books? They were primitive old things, weren’t they? Cumbersome blocks of paper and glue, being lugged around only a few at a time and the pages always staying the same. Thankfully, we’ve come to our senses and done away with them; well, we haven’t yet, but given the rise of the eBook Reader in the past two years, paper books are set to become a fiction. Likewise, when e-commerce website Amazon opened its servers in the late nineties they exclusively sold books, but now sell everything from Playstations to Marmite. But, going back to their roots, the first product Amazon manufactured themselves was the eBook Reader that kicked off the reading revolution. Now in its third generation, has the Kindle done for reading what Amazon did for shopping?

Amazon Kindle 3...and some books

Where the previous Kindle models had the tacky white casing of the lower priced MacBooks, the third generation sports a stylish graphite chassis less than a centimetre in width. Amazon have packed the keyboard and navigation buttons closer together to accommodate this sleeker casing. The page-turn buttons have been placed on either side of the Kindle’s 6-inch eInk screen, with the page-forward buttons are considerably larger than the page-back buttons, on the basis that you’ll use them more because you still read in an old-fashioned, linear fashion, you Luddite! The back-cover is a rather plain affair, but houses two speaker grilles at the top for when you’re using the text-to-speech function, because you’re too cheap to buy an audiobook. Underneath, you’ll uncover standard 3.5mm headphone jack, USB port, volume rocker and standby switch.

The new Kindle comes with Wi-Fi built in, and on the slightly pricier model comes with 3G as well. This is a major draw for bibliophiles and technophiles alike as it’s a free, contract-less, data connection that allows you to download eBooks from Amazon’s prolific store on a whim. Notably, the Kindle doesn’t support the open eBook format ePub, so you are mostly tied down to the Amazon store for getting your Tolstoy on. The Kindle also allows web browsing, but on an eInk screen this is tricky as most websites weren’t designed with greyscale in mind. Though it’s specially-adapted Wikipedia site does give the Kindle a delightful Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy feel, for general web browsing its poorly equipped. Predictably, the web browser is hidden behind a menu labelled “Experimental” which makes us think that if Amazon’s data bill racks up too much they may decide to pull the web-browsing feature from the Kindle altogether. The Kindle can also be linked to your Facebook and Twitter profiles and you can share passages and notes on a book, though you may lose all your friends as a result because you’ll look like a pretentious prick.

You cunt

The biggest difference between eBook Readers of this ilk and their sometimes competitor, the iPad, is the eInk screen. These screens essentially burn an image onto a screen by applying a charge to negatively and positively charged particles. These displays are beautifully crisp and clear, almost as though you’re looking at a perfectly printed page, in fact you more or less are. The main benefit of this feature is that you can read for long periods of time without getting the eye-strain you’d get from perusing an LCD screen. It’s black-and-white, but, on a device that’s primary purpose is reading books, colour seems a little redundant. Secondly, the screen only draws power from the battery when the display changes and is otherwise practically off; Amazon boasts that this allows a battery life of up to a month even with frequent use. In our testing, we found the battery drained quicker when the Kindle’s on-board Wi-Fi or 3G connections are put through their paces, but otherwise the battery life was pretty good. The Kindle lacks a backlight, another battery-saving measure, but this isn’t really a drawback because neither do books; if you’re really that bothered about reading in the dark, you probably can’t read anyway, buy some crayons and a colouring book instead.

As with any massive paradigm-shift, reading the device as you would a book takes a little getting used to. It’s definitely off-putting at first to have to focus on a screen, a specific area on the device, rather than scan the whole frame as you would a book. It’s a new sensation to be looking at one page at a time rather than having two pages visible at a time, but dual-screen would’ve looked odd and been rather unnecessary on the Kindle. Oddly, when you’re reading a book, a progress bar runs along the bottom of the display and shows what percentage through the title you’ve gone; suddenly, reading has become a numbers game. All these peculiarities were easy to become accustomed to, however, and after that it felt perfectly natural to read this way, as though you’re reading a small, changeable, piece of paper rather than a hefty book. The Kindle reading experience also comes with full control over text-size and screen orientation, in case you feel like reading upside-down, and full text-to-speech functionality, in case you ever feel like being read to by the speaking clock and, let’s face it, we all have at some time.

The Kindle's eInk screen is a polarising feature

Will the Amazon Kindle’s new incarnation write the final chapter for the printed word? No. Books are one of the oldest medium we have, and they’ve become so engrained on our culture that thinking that a single device can obliterate them in one fell swoop would be ludicrous. But could this undermine their place in our culture, usurped in the home and force them to retreat back to their secure sanctuaries: the libraries? Or will such a massive change turn out to simply be a gimmick, a niche idea that entertains the few but fails to take hold of the many? At this early stage in the life of the eBook Reader it’s very difficult to say; in fact, it’s not even worth making a prediction, time will tell.

The Amazon Kindle is available from Amazon.com, and is around £111 for the Wi-Fi only model and around £152 for the 3G and Wi-Fi model.

Nexus Hubbubery

Whenever there’s a consumer electronic’s show, I can’t afford to go. Nor am I famous enough to be specifically invited, nor do I work for any big publication willing to send me out there to cover it for freesies. But if I was, say, in Las Vegas right now for the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), I’d have to be organised which, as you may’ve noticed, I’m not very good at yet, but I plan to start working on that………..sometime. I hate going through the tech websites at this time of year because all of them are so loaded with information and reports that you can nary keep up. I generally wait until it’s all over, then go through the collective stories and pick out ones that interest me – a dubious method for a current tech news blog – but this story cannot be ignored.

Google, who you would’ve thought had already dipped their toe in the smartphone waters, found it tepid and thrown it’s considerable weight into the clear blue; splashing up it’s Android OS, prevalent in the smartphone market simply for the amount of devices it’s on. It seems that they’ve gotten jealous of the amount of money HTC has made on handsets, providing their open-source OS must’ve been relatively cheap, and decided to build their own pool – “shocking” the tech world by unveiling their new phone – the Nexus One.

This smartphone will, unsuprisingly, run Google’s Android OS and, to be honest, doesn’t seem to have anything that I’d be persuaded by. Sure it’s perfect synergy – other companies made the handsets, Google made the OS and then the two were welded together like some hideous Frankenstein’s Monster smartphone – and if Google has control of both, you’d get the impression that the handset and OS would be optimised for one another. Indeed, the handset is reportedly much faster and runs far better than other Android phones, but past experience shows that this does not mean Google know what to do.

Remember, this is the first time Google have released ANYTHING entirely hardware based and making their debut with something as intricate, market-refined and closely scrutinised as a phone handset, and then having to “deal” with the heavy publicity after some scallywag “leaked” pictures of the handset late last year – by which I mean creating so much hubbubery – seems like a strange idea and, if I’m honest, the general result of that is that the handset will be crap.

Microsoft was sitting pretty for a long time as the only real contender in the smartphone OS market, whilst sitting pretty much on their arse the whole time. Apple released the iPhone with it’s own OS and inadvertedly inspired companies to release their own. Apart from this, regular phones have almost always come loaded with an OS designed and made by the handset manufacturer, and they usually take a few generations before they become comfortable on the hardware. Because Google release an OS first and their handset second will mean that they will spend a few generations with a good OS but a crap phone and the result will remain out of sync rather than allowing both aspects to be refined simultaneously.

That’s a view you could take but I think Google have played a blinder here. Rather than sink their own capital into a handset to test the waters (I’m back to that awkward swimming pool analogy) of their own software, they’ve lent it out to other manufacturers to get their “Google phone” publicised and tested out their OS, found that it’s become immensely popular and now feel that the OS has had enough time, enough tweaks, enough alterations to release hardware that will cater to the needs of the OS, as defined by the user this whole time. HTC, the most prolific conoceur of Android-laden handsets, has been little more than a vehicle for testing. Everyone whose bought an Android handset so far has been an unwitting beta tester for kind old Uncle Google lending out their OS, smiling warmly and saying “have that on me!”. Now cracks the noble heart and dawneth the second stage of Google’s master plan. I will not be suprised at all if, in the next few months, Google halts provision of Android to other manufacturers and begins allowing Android only on their own handsets, to create the sense of exclusivity that iPhone and Palm Pre have with their Operating Systems.

Of course, I maintain that Google doesn’t know enough about the hardware aspect to make a phone that will live up to the OS. I anticipate there will be many complaints about the phone being sluggish to load and other similar problems with the hardware once it’s in the hands of the user rather than being flashed around by some marketing executive in a Google-coloured suit. Although, I wouldn’t buy anything from a man who dressed like Colin Baker.

Their catchprase for this phone is also baffling, “Web meets Phone”? – the web met the phone in 2001, they’ve already married, had kids, grown apart, have increasingly frequent arguments and only stay together for the sake of their kids little 3G and his retarded older brother WAP.