Amazon Kindle

In a world slowly but surely getting more electronic, people ain't much for book-reading. Enter the slender Kindle, allowing you to carry hundreds of titles in a tiny frame that, unbelievably, has the same effect as reading off a page -- it's like magic.

Paul Daniels would be in awe of the E-Ink screen that has no backlight, and doesn't reflect (much), making the thing readable in direct sunlight. Abracadabra. Adding to this is (in America) the free Whispernet, which lets you buy books on the device. It even lets you surf the internet, which is a mixed bag with a clunky monochrome browser that's prone to crashing.

The device sports 80's space-looks, controls invisibly, but is let down by the slow, black and white screen. For the price, we expect so much more, but images are ugly, pixelated and hard to make out. No white bunny rabbit here.

The overall feeling is that the Kindle is a leap in the right direction. The Amazon infrastructure is there and has a fantastic selection, and receiving the paper as if by magic on turning on the device is great. Niggling issues bring it down, but we're sure that the Kindle version 2 will be a must-have gadget. As it stands, The Kindle is merely an overexpensive book-worm pleaser for now.

Add to del.icio.us

Digg this

Post to Furl

Add to reddit

Add to myYahoo!