Product Reviews

After years of attempts by myriad different companies, Amazon may finally have cracked the eBook market with the release of its much-hyped new Kindle eBook reader in the US. It's compact, easy to use, the text quality is excellent and, crucially, there are more than 90,000 eBooks to choose from already, including many that are actually worth reading.

Once it's out of the box, the most noticeable aspect of the Kindle is that it's nowhere near as ugly as it looks in many of the photographs doing the rounds online. It's unlikely to win any design awards based on its aesthetics, but neither is it anything like as bad as some have claimed. But it's clearly been designed with usability in mind, and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has himself claimed that one of the key design points is to allow the reader to forget they're using the device at all, becoming immersed in the book itself.

The Kindle's 6in display uses a technology known as E Ink, which produces extremely high-quality text on a slightly greyish background. It's reflective, rather than transmissive, so it's readable even in bright sunlight. Despite the fact that it's only capable of showing four shades of grey, it makes a decent fist of showing basic graphics. When it comes to reading, much has been made of the fact that changing pages produces a half-second "flash", where the image is inverted to white-on-black before the next page displays. In fact, we found that we quickly became used to this and, within a few pages of a suitable compelling text, we found that we stopped consciously noticing it at all.

There's a Previous Page and Next Page button on each side of the Kindle, so you can use it in either hand. We do feel that the Previous Page button on the left side could have been made smaller, to reduce the likelihood of hitting it inadvertently, but it otherwise works well. The supplied leather cover is designed to bend all the way back behind the Kindle when it's in use, and the overall experience is very much like holding a real book. Alternatively, you can remove the cover altogether, although we found that the Next and Previous Page buttons were much easier to hit

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by mistake when we did.

There are already other eBook readers, such as the Sony Reader and iRex's iLiad (web ID: 125302), but what makes the Kindle stand out is the fact that it includes a cellular wireless connection, allowing you to access the Amazon Kindle store from anywhere, not just from places with a Wi-Fi access point. There's no charge for this wireless connectivity, since Amazon pays for it under a deal with Sprint in the US. Newly purchased books download in less than a minute, and most are priced at $9.99 or below - far less than the equivalent hardback version and often less than the paperback. Amazon had more than 90,000 books available at launch, along with subscriptions to a few newspapers and several blogs, although we're not sure how many people will be willing to pay for blog content they can read on their computer for free.

But it's the fact that you can buy and download books without connecting the Kindle to a PC that makes this device so appealing. You really can buy a book on the spur of the moment - indeed, it's so easy we're starting to become worried about the credit card bill at the end of the month. If you do connect the Kindle to your PC or Mac via the included USB cable, it appears as a simple USB storage device, and you can transfer files to and from it, which will then be readable on the device.

The Kindle supports standard image file formats and plain text documents - if you have Word documents, you can email them to a dedicated address and Amazon will automatically convert them to the Kindle's proprietary format. This is free if you have them emailed back or $0.10 per document if you want them wirelessly transferred to your Kindle. The service works well and converted our test Word documents flawlessly. One showstopper for some will be the fact that PDFs aren't currently supported, but given that the Kindle runs a version of Linux we're sure a way round that will be found before long.

Despite its minor flaws, the Kindle really is a breakthrough eBook reader. It isn't going to completely replace "real" books any time soon, but it could easily become a must-have for anyone who travels frequently and doesn't enjoy carrying a bag full of paperbacks with them. Amazon hasn't, however, yet said when the Kindle will be available in the UK. The US version doesn't use GSM, so will have to be re-engineered for a European version, and new carrier agreements sorted to provide the free wireless access. But given that the first batch of Kindles sold out in the US within six hours of launch, it would be astonishing if the product wasn't available in the UK sooner rather than later.