Amazon Kindle 2011 (with Special Offers, Wi-Fi)

The good: The entry-level Amazon Kindle 2011 is a compact, lightweight, and ultra-affordable e-book reader with a crisp Pearl e-ink screen and Wi-Fi. It offers access to a massive catalog of books, magazines, and newspapers via Amazon.com's familiar online store, plus online loaners from your local library. The Kindle can hold hundreds of books and the battery lasts for weeks.

The bad: The lack of a touch screen means that input is limited to a cumbersome directional pad and virtual keyboard. There is no support for audio. All accessories--including a cover and an AC charger--cost extra. You need to spend an extra $30 if you don't want the ad-supported Special Offers version.

The bottom line: If you don't want to spend the extra $20 to upgrade to the forthcoming touch-screen version, the entry-level 2011 Kindle is a great choice for an ultraportable and superaffordable no-frills e-ink reader.

A screensaver ad on the Special Offers version of the Kindle.

A lot of people have been waiting a long time for Amazon.com to drop the price of its Kindle to less than $100. Well, that day is here, but Amazon has thrown a little wrench into the equation: it's offering two sub-$100 models, the $79 entry-level Kindle reviewed here and the $99Wi-Fi Kindle Touch, which is due to ship in mid-November.

To be clear, to get that sub-$100 pricing for the devices, you'll have to purchase the ad-supported Special Offers versions. The ad-free versions cost $30 and $40 more, respectively. The Touch is also offered in a version that adds free 3G wireless for $149 (Special Offers) and $189 (ad-free).

Whether you opt to pay more for the ad-free version is up to you, but we must say that we didn't find the ads to be intrusive (they don't appear in books; they only appear at the bottom of the home page and as screensavers when you turn off the device). That issue aside, the bigger question is whether you should choose the budget $79 Kindle or hold out to spend the extra $20 on the Kindle Touch.

The short answer is: hold out for the Kindle Touch if you can afford that extra $20. That doesn't mean the non-touch Kindle isn't good--it's a perfectly decent e-reader that's slimmer and lighter than the 2010 Kindle (which has now been redubbed "Kindle Keyboard"), and it's the only current Kindle with hard buttons for turning pages (if that's your preference). If you don't need to use the virtual keyboard too much and you're just looking for a no-frills e-book reader, it's hard to argue with the $79 price tag.

Design
The first thing you notice when you take the new Kindle out of the box is how light and thin it is. In four years, the Kindle has gone from being pretty ungainly to now being a fetching electronic device (Jeff Bezos said that Kindle 3 owners would be upset when they saw the new Kindle, and he's mostly right).

The basic Kindle is the smallest and lightest of the three new Kindles, weighing 5.98 ounces. At 6.5 inches long by 4.5 inches wide by a scant 0.34 inch thick, it's slightly smaller all around than the Kindle Touch and it weighs 1.5 ounces less. The Barnes & Noble Nook Touch, by comparison, is very similar in size and weight to the Kindle Touch.

Since this Kindle lacks a touch screen, page turns are accomplished via buttons mounted on either side of the screen. We didn't like the page-turn buttons quite as much as those on the earlier Kindle, but they're basically fine. (The $99 Kindle Touch has no physical page-turn buttons--you tap on the screen to go back or forward.)

Below the screen is a five-way directional pad for navigating menus (and working the virtual keyboard), and four other keys: a back button, home, keyboard toggle, and menu. "Typing" on the keyboard requires shoving the cursor around, similar to entering onscreen text with a video game controller.

We've always found the Kindle interface simple enough to navigate and use, but we do prefer touch-screen navigation. While we haven't used the Kindle Touch yet, we have seen in-person demos, and just as with the Nook Touch, touch navigation offers a better user experience.

Features
Though Amazon has moved from the Kindle 3.1 OS on last year's Kindle Keyboard to Kindle OS 4.0 on this model, we really didn't see any significant changes to the user interface; it's basically the same.

Amazon natively supports its Kindle (AZW) format for e-books, along with TXT, PDF, unprotected MOBI, and PRC files (you can drag the latter four file formats onto the device from your computer). It also supports HTML, DOC, DOCX, JPEG, GIF, PNG, and BMP through conversion.

Like the Nook, the Kindle supports limited lending of e-books: publisher-approved titles can be lent out once for two weeks to one fellow Kindle user. Kindles also now support library lending. If your public library offers e-book lending, you can "check out" e-books for free for one or two weeks. Only certain titles are available to check out, but the list is growing.

The latest models, like all previous Kindles, use Amazon's WhisperSync technology. That means you can download books in less than a minute, and resume books where you left off on other Kindle-compatible devices. Thanks to Amazon's nearly universal app support, Kindle books can be accessed on iPads, iPhones, iPod Touch handhelds, Android phones running version 2.1 and later, Android tablets, many BlackBerry phones, Windows PCs, Macs, Windows Phone 7 phones, and via HTML 5-compatible browsers for people using the Kindle Cloud Reader. And, of course, you can access the e-books on other hardware Kindles, including theKindle Fire.

Like other Kindles, this one includes an "experimental browser." It's always been a little crude and e-ink is sluggish by nature, but it worked better than we thought it would--we loaded a Gmail account and NYTimes.com--and would certainly do in a pinch. Again, we expect browsing to be a better experience on the Touch.

Another nice Amazon benefit: Kindles get free Wi-Fi access to AT&T hot spots throughout the U.S.

What's missing

Aside from the smaller dimensions, the lack of a keyboard is really the biggest physical change to the Kindle from last year's model. While some people liked having a keyboard for basic Web browsing and searches in the Kindle Store and within books, we never found it to be an essential feature. Yes, manually moving the cursor around the pop-up, onscreen keyboard is a little tedious, but we didn't find it to be as big of a nuisance as we thought it would be. That said, being able to type with your fingers on the Kindle Touch's virtual keyboard will surely be easier and faster, if the Nook Touch and similar touch-screen readers are any indication.

There are some other feature step-downs from most other Kindles. If you choose this model instead of the Kindle Touch, you get no audio--this guy is silent. That means if you're a fan of audiobooks, playing background music while you read, or using Amazon's text-to-speech ("read-to-me") feature, you should opt for the Touch instead.

Likewise, the new Kindle has "only" 2GB of storage and no expansion slot, versus twice that for other models. But that's still enough for 1,400 books, and if you ever have need to go beyond that, your book purchases are stored "in the cloud"--you can delete and redownload purchases as needed in less than a minute.

Amazon says you can get up to a month's use from the device before needing to recharge the battery, based on 30 minutes of reading a day and keeping the Wi-Fi turned off. That's half the battery life of the previous Kindle, so to shrink the device Amazon appears to have had to go with a smaller battery. In case you're wondering, the battery is sealed in and not user-replaceable, which seems par for the course for most e-book readers these days.

It's also worth noting that Amazon doesn't ship an AC adapter with this Kindle (or with the Touch); it's a $10 optional accessory. Only a USB charging cable is included. That's somewhat annoying, but because the Kindle has a standard Micro-USB port, any modern cell phone charger should do the trick. We tried a generic AC charger, and it worked fine.

Performance

This Kindle--like the 2010 Kindle, the Nook Touch, the Kobo Touch, and the latest Sony Readers--uses E Ink's Pearl screen technology. In other words, the text on the screen looks exactly like it did on the previous model, which is to say: it looks good, but don't expect any improvements in contrast or sharpness.

As with all e-ink displays, it's easy to read in bright light, as it doesn't get washed out in direct sunlight the way LCD does, but since the screen isn't backlit, you do need a light source to read. Amazon sells leather covers with built-in LED lamps, but at $60, they cost almost as much as the reader itself.

Amazon claims that a new processor has increased the speed of page turns, but when we compared this model with the Kindle Keyboard side by side, we barely noticed a difference in the speed of the page turns. Any increase is very slight.

While the previous Kindle models "flashed" (refreshing the screen like a photographic negative) between every page turn, the new Kindle seems to have followed Barnes & Noble's lead and cut the flashing to once every six pages or so.

The long and the short of it is that this Kindle, aside from the shorter battery life, seems to perform the same as or very slightly better than the previous model. That's good, considering it costs less.

Conclusion

So long as you're not a fan of the 2010 Kindle's keyboard or audio features, you'll think this new base Kindle is a nice advancement, with a smaller, lighter form factor and an overall sleeker look. In fact, if given the choice between this model and the Kindle Keyboard, we'd have no hesitation taking this one, and it's a good value at $79. Yes, we'd suggest buying the Special Offers version over the version that isn't ad-supported unless you are vehemently opposed to seeing any form of ad on your Kindle.

The Barnes & Noble Nook Touch edges out this version of the Kindle by virtue of its touch screen--but it currently costs $60 more, and $30 more than the Special Offers version of the Kindle Touch. That is cash you could use to buy yourself a lot of e-books instead.

Posted in: Gadget Review, Gadgets you must have