Kindle Touch: A Quick Review

 

So far I love the Kindle Touch! The on-screen keyboard is very easy to use, much better than the Kindle physical keyboard, especially the one on the K3, which has no number row (that's why my old one in the picture above has stickers above the letters). Typing on the KT is very like using the iPad keyboard where you have a letters-only keyboard and a numbers and punctuation keyboard, and tapping the same key toggles from one to the other. You tap the shift key before pressing a letter to upper case, and that makes the display of the letters change to upper case, which is really nice.

One-handed reading is very easy! Paging forward and back works from a single tap on the left or right side of the screen, or you can finger swipe across the page. I had to ask on the Kindle forums to find out how to jump forward and backward a chapter at time, but it's very easy; you just swipe up and down instead of horizontally.

Text-to-speech sounds exactly the same, but once you turn it on, a menu for it stays on the screen so it is dead easy to pause, change the gender of the voice or the reading speed, or exit.

The book menu has a font key, but you can also use pinch and zoom gestures while you're reading a book to make text larger or smaller. This works in the browser, too, although the browser itself only works in WiFi mode (except for reading Wikipedia).

And really, the thing is just so pretty! As you can see in the photo, the KT is not really that much smaller than the K3, but it seems so much more compact and easier to hold.  The screen savers are lovely! I did not get the ad-laden version and now I am especially glad. The screen savers are images that could be photographs or line drawings but most of them picture either writing or instruments for writing— pens, pencils, calligraphy brush strokes, and cold type.

I told my husband that he's now the proud owner of a Kindle Keyboard, because I'm keeping this one!