New versions of e book readers

Which has tested two e book readers available from Amazon under the Kindle label, as well as one from Sony. It isn’t long since all this family of Kindle’s started – in October 2009.  They’ve progressed so fast in technical terms in this should timespan. This entire area is becoming more and more competitive.

There are now four generations of Kindle. The first was the 2007, available only in the US. The second generation has a capacity of about 1,500 books and weighs in at 290g. The third generation of Kindle was launched in 2010, was available in a Wi Fi version or with 3G and you could store about 3,500 books on it, with enhanced batteries that would last about a month between recharging. The fourth generation of Kindle appeared in 2011 and holds less books – about 1,400 – but is cheapest at about £89 and also very light and convenient at 170g.

The newest, fourth generation, version of Kindle is the Amazon Kindle Touch. This has a touchscreen, built in loudspeakers and a headphone jack so that you can use it to support an audio-book. You can buy it with 3 Gigabytes so that you can buy and download a book whilst on the move. It holds a maximum of about 3,000 books and the battery should last about two months before it needs recharging. This represents more or less double the capacity of the original Kindle. The weight of this new Kindle is about 220g, which is about half the weight (well, 430g less) than the latest version of iPad. As far as I can tell, you can only use this to support e books in the Kindle Store run by Amazon. As far as I can tell as well, there is no way you can use this to borrow books from your local library.

The new Sony – PRS-T1 costs about £130. It also has a touchscreen, weighs only 165g and you use it to support viewing books produced in ePub. Normally, in the UK you borrow these from public libraries.

www.which.co.uk/whichkindle