Kindle for iPhone – Gives Books and The Real Kindle a Run For Their Money

Posted by Editor on Jan 21, 2010 in Amazon Kindle, Apple, Reviews, Tablets, apps, iPhone

As we move into the Apple Tablet era I wanted to test drive what the experience might be like so I downloaded the Amazon Kindle for iPhone Reader [FREE AppStore] from the iTunes Store. Kindle for iPhone is meant as a standalone or companion to an Amazon Kindle eBook reader. You can shop for books online using your Amazon.com account, purchase, download and read all in this clever little application.

Kindle for iPhone is a very light download so you’ll be up and running in no time, you just need to enter your Amazon.com account details. Then you are taken into a Safari browser session to pick out books. Couple of nice features, you can download decent sized free samples of any book you’re interested in and if you have a Kindle it will automatically sync up so you have one copy on the Kindle and one for the iPhone. I chose a cookbook about making Japanese food.

Once you leave the Safari session, Kindle for iPhone automatically takes over again and your titles appear in the Home section of the application. You point to the book you want to view and it immediately jumps to the chapter index. To read a book you tap on the left side of the screen to go back a page and the right side to go forward, all very intuitive and I daresay more fun than using the physical buttons on the Kindle.

While reading you can tap once on the screen to bring up the navigation options. From top to bottom you have a link to your Home library along with the title of the current book. Then you have 5 font size settings to give your own personal trade off between legibility and amount of text per ‘page.’ Finally you have a choice of black text on white BG, white on black or a faux sepia look. You can also add bookmarks and there’s a slider to quickly jump around the pages of the book.

You can also easily view books in portrait or landscape mode by tilting your iPhone. In general the navigation is great though I couldn’t understand why pinch to zoom into the text didn’t work. Instead you have to call up the menu tab and select one of five font sizes, perhaps this is a function of Amazon’s book format that’s optimized for the Kindle. Also pictures jump out from the text clumsily, though at least you can pinch zoom those.

It’s interesting to compare the experience not only to a physical book but also to Amazon’s actual Kindle device. Compared to a book, there are obvious differences, either you much prefer looking at paper or you can handle looking at an LCD screen to read text. These days I’m thinking more and more people are completely accostumed to reading text on a screen so print may well be dead. My dad has an Amazon Kindle that I got to play with a little last Christmas. Personally it’s a toss up between the Kindle and the iPhone version:

Kindle Pros

Much bigger screen that’s easier on the eyes and usable in direct sunlight
Feels more book-like
Longer battery life

iPhone Pros

You can do a lot more than just read books, pocketable
Can listen to music simultaneously
Touch screen navigation feels more natural than Kindle’s many buttons

I like the idea of reading books on the iPhone but I think it would be impossible to read a lot this way. Maybe a quick sneak at a book you’re reading on a Kindle while you wait for a train, doctor’s office, etc. It’s a lot easier than trying to shoehorn 40 books into your pocket, that’s for sure and you can also make calls on it and listen to music. If you want to know a little early what reading a book on the iPad/Tablet/Slate’s screen might be like, try this out. It’s also FREE so what have you got to lose?

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