Amazon Kindle

Amazon Kindle Review

by on January 5, 2011

We love Amazon’s Kindle, with its easy-on-the-eyes e-ink screen and its mammoth battery life. But having our purchased Kindle books available on our iPhone – for free, no less – is just spoiling us.

Set up is simple: log into your Amazon account and the app automatically syncs all your purchased titles with your iPhone, offering them to you in a list searchable by author, title or recently read. Tap one and it will start re-downloading the title (free, of course) to your iPhone, for your sans-Kindle perusal.

Initial worries about reduced screen size were put to rest – while reading on the iPhone screen is never going to feel as natural or relaxed as on an actual Kindle’s e-ink screen, you can whack the font size up to mean you’re not straining yourself unduly. It takes a bit of getting used to having to flick over the page every few sentences, but it’s better than pinching to zoom at a regular-sized page squashed up to fit the iPhone’s screen. A smartphone is never going to be ideal for lengthy reading, but as a short term literary distraction it’s solid.

The usual Kindle features are all present and correct, letting you search through your collection for a specific word or phrase, and the app also has a “Get Books” button that pipes you straight through to the Kindle Store. The auto-sync is also a nice feature, remembering if you’ve read further in the same book on the phone than you have on the Kindle and offering to put you back on the right page.

All in all, the iPhone’s Kindle app does the difficult job of turning a smartphone into an e-reader as well as anything could, and given its £0.00 pricetag, it’s a bonus Kindle owners owe to themselves to pick up.

Download this app: Kindle for iPhone

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