Amazon Kindle Keyboard 3G + Wi-Fi > Reviews (43)

I opted for the wi-fi only kindle on the basis that the £109.00 was an absolute bargin and that I could always download any books I needed at home. The extra £40.00 or so I think would only be worth it if you travelled an awful lot or you paid for your daily newspapers to be downloaded (a great idea but not for me). The setup and registration of the Kindle was easy with no major issues and the performance once charged up is very good. There are so many good features to this that I'm glad that I waited until the 3rd edition of it as everything now seems to be fully thought out and functions fine.
For me the top features are the availabilty of free classics, the ability to make notes and highlight passages of text, the speed of change of page, the lightness and slimness of the reader, ease of navigation and the excellent e-ink display (oh yes and the fact that it lasts one month on a single charge). So downsides, the only one I can find is with Amazon's insistence that the Kindle wont / can't display books in the epub format. In practice this means that you're restricted to the purchase of books from Amazon as sites such as WHSmiths and Waterstones use the epub format. Worse still is the fact that as libraries in the UK are gradually beginning to lend books electronically it is in the epub format that they are doing it. However to mitigate against this problem Amazon's kindle bookstore is very comprehensive and the prices seem to be pretty competitive. If you buy a kindle a real boost to books you can read is a piece of free software for your PC called Calibre which enables you to reformat non copyrighted material into a format the kindle can display (you'll need this if your trying to read pdf files as the resizing of text isn't very flexible and you'll end up scrolling all about the text just to read it). Overall though after a week or two of use I can honestly say that I'm very impressed with the Kindle and am happy to call it an absolute bargin.