Amazon sets date for Kindle Touch UK touchdown The Kindle Touch will be out in the UK from 27 April, and is available to pre-order on Amazon from today. At a cost of £109 (with free delivery), the Wi-Fi Kindle Touch has a multi-touch E Ink display – making it a step-up from the button-clicking vanilla Kindle. The Kindle Touch has a two-month battery life and text to speech …
Sony's touch readers are very decent devices. E-ink is very slow but touch makes it far more tolerable than navigating through buttons with arrows or festooning the device with shortcut buttons. The PRS-T1 apparently runs Android underneath and can be hacked into a more general purpose device. So in theory you could install FBReader, maybe even Kindle onto it though I don't know if anyone has tried.
I have applied the hack to open up the PRS-T1 android OS and I can run the Kindle software just fine. Only slight annoyance is that the fonts won't go as small as I would like. You have to sure to tap to move pages not swipe on the app otherwise it causes loads of e-ink flicker as it tries to animate the page turn.
If i wanted a touch screen I would buy an iPad.... It arrives today!
I have a kindle, £89, for reading the odd novel. I like the ergonomics of the side buttons and can put my greasy hands all over it without upsetting the non reflective screen.
This is invention for inventions sake and adds no value to the original kindle design.
"I like the ergonomics of the side buttons"
Same here and for the same reasons. I used a borrowed "touch" ereader for a week. Initially it was interesting but I found it more awkward to use. The Kindle with the side mounted page turn buttons means they are always at your fingertips. That, in my mind, is an improvement over dead tree books whereas a touch screen is emulating the exact mechanical action of turning a page.
My only (minor) gripe with the kindle is the left/right positioning of the page turn buttons. Even now, after reading many, many books on it, I still feel the need to press the "next page" button on the left to go back one page rather than the button above the "next page" button. Maybe a firmware update could offer some options for the functions of the next/previous page buttons, eg choose to have left=back, right=forward or vice versa for left handers.
Because with a touchscreen, at least with my Sony touch screen reader, you can write notes in the margins (not useful for reading novels I grant you, but it is very useful for annotating journal articles), and you can turn it into an electronic notebook, which I find useful for note-taking at talks/meetings etc.
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Yeah, as I sit surrounded by people reading Kindles on the tube every morning I often think 'Fail!'. I have no data to prove this, apart from my own observation, but I honestly think you see as many people reading Kindles as you do real books.
I've never seen a Kobo outside the WHSmiths display at Euston...
What I want to see is a review of the Ectaco colour eBook reader. I presume it's a reskinned version of the South Korean one but available over here and would like to see someone take it through it's paces before I part with £350(!) of my own money on one. Go on, El Reg, you know you want to have a play with one too.
It is the same as the current version of the Kindle, a USB lead which also allows you to transfer .mobi files from your computer, such as those available from Project Gutenberg. The touch screen doesn't have much appeal for me, but it's a natural enough upgrade. How does it work with a screen-protector film stuck on?
Just a note about the charger - Any micro USB charger will do, the one for my Desire works fine.
However, my wife didn't know that when she bought me a kindle as a surprise present. When I realised she had dropped £14 or whatever on the charger, I said she should return it. She contacted Amazon to return it and they refunded the money but said "keep it" (presumably they're worth less to Amazon than the psotage would've been)
So the lesson here is buy one then return it - free charger!
I've had a kindle for two years and my initial action was to simply read everything on the Kindle.
I did this for over 12 months.
One day, I picked up a book (fiction) from the shelf and realised just how much of a better reading experience it is over the Kindle.
Having said that - and before I get down voted into obscurity - I think the real place for Kindle is services such as instapaper or technical reference books.
I still use my Kindle, but for leisure reading, books are just ... heck, better, more accessible, easier to read, faster to page through. I have no desire to *search* a book of fiction.
I'm going to completely re purpose my Kindle experience with this in mind - remove all the fiction off it and simply use it for reference purposes... in which case, I may as well get an iPad ...
I found completely the opposite. When you have bad eyesight, you have to deal with all manner of magnification devices and/or large print books. These things are awkward to say the least. The kindle lets you adjust the font size, and that alone makes it far more appealing to me than a dead tree. Add in the note taking, passage marking and bookmarking features and the ability to carry hundreds of books around and it's just so much better that I've found I've done far more reading since getting it than I had in the 5 years previously.
And I find searching pretty handy when looking up quotes!
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