So Amazon announced a KFC family-sized bucket of new Kindles but only gave us poor Blighty natives one model to play with. The paltry excuse for its touch and Fire tablet was that Amazon was at the whim of potentially infringing EU data legislation. But it’s more likely that it was an issue of not being able to offer a decent enough content system. Amazon then had the audacity to set the RRP for its fourth generation Kindle at £89. It’s not even that in dollars in the US where it costs about £50.Amazon kept the same stunning 6-inch e-Ink screen, shrinking everything else around it to make it more portable. The marketing men will tell you you can put it in your pocket and you can but that’s a pointless exercise. If you sat on it in your back pocket it would break. That said, taking away so much real estate, made the Kindle 4 only weigh 170g so it’s 30 per cent lighter and 18 per cent smaller.
At six inches, the screen size is unchanged, it’s not as bright as the Apple iPad, but e-ink is far more comfortable on the eye, so there’s less chance of strain. It’s still the same 800x600 resolution on a matte black display and text literally pops out at you. For online browsing using Amazon’s still experimental web browser, it is rubbish. And it is still cack for your own images. But we care not because it does the job it’s meant to do unequivocally brilliantly. Amazon even claimed it has a 10 per cent faster refresh and it is very fast though we didn’t have the third gen to hand to see if it was much faster.
