Amazon Kindle (2011) impressions

Price was among the many reoccurring themes at today’s Amazon event in Ny city, and nowhere was that factor more present than with the new Kindle . At $79, this truly is an entry level device, and definitely the corporate made some sacrifices to hit that price point — most glaringly, the reader doesn’t have the touchscreen featured in both the Kindle Touch and the most recent Nook and Kobo devices — though like those products, the Kindle did lose its physical keyboard, giving it a far smaller footprint than the last generation . As opposed to the infrared touchscreen are a sequence of buttons: Home, Menu, Keyboard and Back. Within the middle is a toggle button that lets the user scroll through menus — that activity might be performed pretty quickly with the physical buttons, and flipping through pages is not very problem with the familiar page buttons on both sides of the screen. Where one really misses the presence of touch, however, is with the on-screen keyboard — typing is performed by clicking one’s way throughout the virtual keyboard, a well-known task for anyone who has ever entered their name initially of a online game with a console controller. Obviously, typing is a secondary task on a tool like this, so for lots of users this may occasionally well not be a deal-breaker. For people who foresee the necessity for such functionality, however, $20 will buy you an upgrade to the Kindle Touch.