Touched In The Head

As part of the process of getting ready to publish a couple of new projects, and as reward for sitting through a two hour focus group, I picked up a Kindle Touch last week. I thought on today, the penultimate post before tomorrow’s 100th post, I’d share a few of my thoughts on the new toy. And because I am a glutton for punishment I am typing this whole post on the new Kindle.

The Touch comes with no writing app but you can pick one up for just 99 cents. It has a 3100 character limit, which will hopefully keep me from droning on and on. Typing’s not too bad though I do have to go back and correct 1 out of 20 words. There are also some games you can buy, mostly word based but they do have Sudoku and Mahjong. The special offers are a little anoying, especially when they turn the wireless back on, but I can live with them for the price savings.

Reading is better than on the Fire though sometimes the screen has an erased paper look. Organizing books into collections is straight forward if time consuming, but I imagine this is faster on the Touch than other eink Kindles. It would be nice if the collections would exclude books you’ve already organized but it is nice that you can put books in more than one collection. The Fire could benefit from this feature.

Text-to-speech is also exclusive to the Touch and Kindle keyboard, and does a fair job of turning ebooks into audiobooks. The speakers seem to have better gain than the Fire, but headphones are still preferable. Web browsing is best on text based sites, but wordpress loads okay if a bit slow. In general the Touch sometimes seems sluggish, but works faster once you know some of the shortcuts.

I was pleased to be able to read magazines though it took me a while to find the back issues on the last page of books. Might have been easier if I hadn’t loaded 1500 books on the thing already. I still have half the device free so still lots of room to grow.

Battery life is good but takes 4 hours to fully charge. Despite the advertised 2 months, the fine print bases that number on 30 min of use a day. Still even with heavy use it lasts much longer than the Fire, or any other portable device I have.

All in all the Touch does maybe 80% of the things I did with the Fire, but at half the price. And I’m allowed to use this one in the bathroom, which let’s be honest is where I do most of my reading.

*whew* Only 45 minutes to type that post. Not bad.