The Amazon Kindle 4 entry level ebook reader is great value for money. It costs just $ 79, which is astonishing when you consider that the Kindle sold for $ 399 when it first hit the market back in November of 2007.
Of course, Amazon has very definitely built the entry level Kindle to a price. It has no physical keyboard, the battery life is one month (compared with two for the Kindle Touch and the Kindle Keyboard) and the memory is 2 GB – compared with 4 GB for the other ebook readers in the Kindle range.
Nevertheless, the Kindle 4 has enough memory to let you carry 1,400 books with you wherever you go. That should be more than enough for even the most voracious reader. In the highly unlikely event that you did run out of memory on your Kindle, you have free unlimited cloud storage for all of your Amazon content anyway.
It’s debatable whether the lack of a physical keyboard is a genuine disadvantage. When you’re reading a book on your Kindle, all you’re going to need are the “page forward” and “previous page” buttons. These are conveniently located on either side of the reader.
In all probability, you will only need to input text when you’re searching for a new Kindle book to download from the Amazon website. When this happens you just open up a virtual keyboard by pressing one of the buttons near the bottom of the Kindle and then use the central toggle switch to select and enter characters.
It may sound a bit clumsy, and so it is, but Amazon has enabled predictive text, so it’s not that bad really. Since it’s going to be a fairly infrequent event – for 99% of the time the page turn buttons will be fine – it’s not that big a deal. If you really can’t bear it, then just use your computer to find books and they will be downloaded to your Kindle automatically.
As far as battery life goes, one month should be quite adequate for most people. That’s based on an average of thirty minutes reading each day by the way.
It’s still a lot better than the eight to ten hours that you might expect from either a notebook or a tablet computer. It’s also long enough to mean that you won’t need to pack your power cable and charger if you go away for a short business trip, or even a vacation (not unless you plan on reading an awful lot of books).
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