Amazon Kindle 4

I bought a Kindle 4 recently. It is a beautiful e-book reader - cheap, lightweight, slim, easy to hold in one hand. The E-Ink technology it uses, is really amazing. The screen seems almost like paper, without any glare, readable in direct sunlight. And the letters on it are solid, you don't see individual pixels. The first time I opened the device, I mistook the screen for a paper cover on it! The device came with a USB data cable which can be used to transfer books and documents. It is also charged via the USB cable. It has super long battery life. One full charge is supposed to last for a month, if you read half an hour daily. I also like the inbuilt Oxford dictionary. You can instantly look-up any word in the dictionary, without leaving the current page. It has page turning buttons on both left and right side, which are very useful for shifting the device from one hand to the other.

I went for the non-touch version instead of Kindle Touch because it is cheaper and it seemed more robust. I can touch the screen without inadvertently turning over pages. The Kindle Touch also had an optional 3G feature. But you do not really need an all time internet connectivity on the device. You can transfer the books (both Kindle books and other supported documents) via USB cable. Also, you can also register the device by its serial no, eliminating any need to go online from the Kindle itself.

Page turns or any change in display are inherently slow (faster than, turning a page in a paperback though!). It is a limitation of the E-Ink technology itself. Also, the display is black and white, with 16 level gray-scale. The screen is 6 inch diagonally.

One thing, I didn't expect, is there is no re-flow option for PDF documents. That is, if you have a document with say A4 page size, the font will be too small to read on the Kindle's 6" screen. Of course, you can zoom in, but then you have scroll it horizontally to see the whole page, which is not a good option. Well, there are some workarounds for it . I prefer to convert my pdf documents to MOBI format with a software like Calibre. Kindle has native support for MOBI format. So you can set font size to whatever you wish.

The Kindle has 2 GB of internal storage of which 1.35 GB is available to the user. It does not have any memory card slot.