It seems like a nice option until you realize that Amazon still applies DRM to many of the e-books they sell.
Consider instead a Kobo Aura HD, and only buy in to DRM-free ebooks and ecosystems unless you like variously burning or flushing your money down the toilet. Maybe both.
It’s physically larger and heavier than the voyage. It doesn’t have buttons for page turns. It doesn’t have the light sensor to automatically adjust brightness.
It does have the same screen as the voyage.
Amazon doesn’t say how much memory are in any of the kindle eink readers. It might have a different amount of memory as the Voyage.
The auto brightness setting is quite nice. The haptic feedback fauxbuttons are just a terrible UI all around. I have nothing good to say about them except that they do not actually seem to set the device on fire when you use them.
I’m clinging to my Kindle Keyboard because it has physical buttons. I really don’t understand why Amazon is being so pig-headed about this. Buttons work. Buttons are good. This country was built on buttons.
I played with a Voyage a bit to see if the fake buttons would work for me. No. Not even a little bit. A particularly special feature I observed was that if the button wouldn’t do anything in a given situation, you would get no haptic feedback when you pressed it. Since the button’s ability to detect your press isn’t 100% reliable, it was great to keep pressing harder and harder before you realize that it’s not pressing because it wouldn’t do anything. Not a great simulation of a real button.
Just bring back the buttons, for the love of everything good and decent!
Have you ever used the kindle keyboard’s experimental web browser?
You can also root the thing and sideload the books. (Is there a root for this model out there already?)
I’m a big fan of the buttons as well. I’m on an OS paperwhite now and always am missing my buttons from the Keyboard version. I was actually considering the Voyage because of the buttons, but didn’t realize they weren’t actually buttons! Thanks.
Apparently the aforementioned improved typography engine still sucks, as full-justification is still irrevocably applied at all but the largest typefaces.
I have, it’s not worth using unless you’re desperate.
I’ve tried it once or twice. I’ve got tablets and computers for web browsing. My Kindle is strictly for reading. It has to do that pretty much flawlessly.
I usually just use my Kindle to read eBooks from my library anyway. It can be an issue if I don’t finish reading them before the due date but even then I can just switch the device to “airplane mode” until I’m done and they stay in place just fine.
That’s an issue with the content, not the device. It still lets you load your own books into it and some publishers (like Tor) sell their books without DRM on Amazon.
and having a real keyboard helps with that?
The real issue with the arrow keys is that it makes using the dictionary to look up words on the page that much more awkward. The web browser is sort of a “stupid kindle trick” I suppose a kindle with both touch and keyboard would be interesting.
If I’m not mistaken, the keyboard kindle was the last kindle to have next/prev page physical buttons. In any case, there are no kindles for sale now that have physical next/prev page buttons.
No need to root. Convert to .mobi, and you can load any drm-free ebook you want. At least, that’s the case with my Kindle keyboard 3G, I can’t imagine that they would have removed that ability since there’s still an official app that lets me send books to my Kindle when it’s connected to wifi. But you can also use Calibre to sideload books without rooting as well
Strictly said, true. But rooting is a matter of gaining more of the ownership of the device.
Sure, and rooting can add a lot more extra functionality too. But for me, no point in doing so since it works just fine without rooting.
Calibre with Apprentice Alf’s plugin makes Kindle DRM a non-issue.
