29 March,2014 08:05 AM IST | | Dhara Vora
The new Kindle offering from Amazon will be a delight for book eaters, with its quick response, easy-on-eye screen
There are several people who might consider books as one of the basic necessities of surviving. But the weight of carrying several books while commuting within the city and travelling can be cumbersome. That is where your ebook readers come in.
This reviewer has always been sceptical about them though, since one owns one of those phablets, which is supposed to be an all-purpose task master. Hence, the prospect of handling (and emptying pockets for) another gadget did not seem a very good idea. But, the 6th generation Kindle Paperwhite managed to convert our belief; well almost.
The first nod that the new offering by Amazon received from us was for its design. It's sleeker than its previous edition, light in weight (206 gms) and is fuss-free: just one power button and USB port at the base. The new edition comes in two versions WiFi enabled, and WiFi- and 3G-enabled. We had the 3G version for review.
The 3G is free to use, though only for browsing and downloading your Amazon ebooks. Which isn't a problem, as it makes the process really quick, for both configuring your device by syncing your Amazon account, and quickly downloading the books.
The screen is another important aspect of the Kindle that wowed us. The brightness is perfect for reading in different light situations, even very sunny locations. Also, it is very caring towards your eyes. Flipping pages (that look very much like real paper) is great too, as the touch response is quick. While reading, you can select a sentence and tweet it.
Thanks to this, we spewed Shakespearan gyan through our Twitter handle that is usually asleep. You can also share your reads on Facebook. So much for showing off! One can also select a word and look it up in the dictionary or Wikipedia (through 3G), and these words get stored in the Vocabulary Builder for future references. Other reading aids include bookmarks, footnotes and, it also predicts the time you will take to finish reading.
The storage facilities are great, too; it comes with inbuilt 2 GB space, and free cloud saving for your Amazon data. Our shoulders were very happy with the freedom from the load of obese books. It also supports a wide variety of formats we transferred a PDF, and are very happy with the feedback.
With so much good happening, the only grouse we had was that it doesn't have a colour screen. So if you are a graphic novel fan, don't even think about this. Other than this low, and the fact that there are cheaper readers now available in India, Kindle Paperwhite managed to make us fall in love with it, gradually.
