Amazon Kindle 3 e-book reader review

Amazon has yet to reveal sales figures for any of its Kindle e-book readers, but its recent announcement that the brand new Kindle 3 is the "fastest selling " model so far doesn't sound too far-fetched once you clap eyes on this stylish slice of electronics.

The Kindle 3 has a similar overall design to Amazon's earlier models, but there's some clear evolutionary improvement in the industrial design.

The screen still measures 6in from corner to corner, but the amount of surrounding plastic has been trimmed to a mere 16mm on three of the sides to make the case about the same size as a DVD movie box (though a little narrower).

This decrease in two dimensions isn't at the expense of an increase in the third either. The Kindle 3 is a mere 8.5mm thick and, at 241g, barely heavier than a typical paperback.

Although the technology has been around for a while, Amazon hasn't opted for a touch-sensitive screen this time around. The 800 x 600 e-ink display on the Kindle 3 has seen some improvements, though.

The screen is whiter than before (though still pale grey) and the fonts blacker, and text is very easy on the eye under all but very dim light.

There's still only a choice of three fonts (normal and condensed serif, plus sans serif), but there's a wide selection of sizes, along with adjustable line spacing and margin width settings.

The new screen's page turns are reckoned to be 20 per cent faster too, which is to say that the full-screen flush required before a new page can be displayed is now not much of a distraction.

The screen also supports a partial refresh, which means drop-down menus and moving cursors work almost as well as on an LCD display.

This faster screen refresh also suits the new and improved WebKit-based web browser. This does a bang-up job of rendering web pages accurately, but we found most are too small to read by default and the browser's fit-to-width option is seldom successful.

There are also four zoom levels, but these rarely fit a column of text across the full width of the screen, and the need to refresh the whole screen each time makes panning left and right to read lines of text a chore.

There is an Article mode that does a better job of reformatting long swathes of text, but in our tests this too was a bit hit and miss when it comes to displaying part of a page you actually want.

That said, the web browser is still accessed via the Kindle 3's 'Experimental' menu, so Amazon clearly doesn't think it's ready for prime time just yet.

The launch of the Kindle 3 coincided with the opening of a UK-specific Kindle e-book store, which means book buyers no longer have to pay Amazon US prices at the prevailing exchange rate.

As before, e-books can be bought from either the Amazon web site with a PC or on the Kindle itself and then wirelessly synced, but other documents can also be dragged to the Kindle when it's plugged into a PC's USB port.

The Kindle 3's storage has been upped to 3.3GB too, which is enough for around 3,500 e-books, although this figure will obviously decrease with multi-megabyte PDFs.

Typed annotations can be added to e-books and PDFs on the go, although the tiny keys of the Kindle 3's Qwerty keyboard mean this is best done using the free Windows Kindle application.

This only works with e-books purchased from Amazon and not, say, with your own PDFs, but annotations made here are automatically synchronised to the Kindle and vice versa.

The other big change for the Kindle 3 is the addition of Wi-Fi, and two models are now available, the 3G plus Wi-Fi for £149 and the standard Wi-Fi only model for £109.

This latter price puts the Kindle 3 into impulse-buy territory for many people, although £99 would no doubt be more tempting.

Battery life for both is still pegged at one month with wireless off, but the Wi-Fi-only model has the edge with wireless enabled, lasting for three weeks, while the power-hungry 3G drops to 10 days.

6in screen; 800 x 600 resolution; Wi-Fi; 3G (3G + Wi-Fi model only); text-to-speech; PDF support; one-month battery life (wireless off); 190 x 123 x 8.5mm; 241g (Wi-Fi model), 247g (3G + Wi-Fi model).