Travels with a Kindle

I took my Kindle on holiday with me last week. Turned out to be a good decision. I loaded it up with a few books (and it also took a few PDF files, including the manual for the camera) and off we went. The Kindle I’ve got has the Whispernet feature, which means that it connects over the 3G phone network and fetches content that way. It also has an experimental web browser. While waiting for a train in Milan last week I fired it up, just to see what would happen.

It worked fine. It looked to me like I was getting free web access abroad (which is usually very expensive). I then bought a travel guide from the Amazon store and this downloaded fine as well. It looks like a Kindle gives you a way of surfing the web for free anywhere in europe, which is interesting. Then again, when the feature stops being experimental it might start being expensive.

As for the travel guide, what I’ve learnt is that for books that you just read straight through a Kindle is great. For things that you want to refer to and flip between pages, like a travel guide, not so great. It made a reasonable job of the pictures and some of the material was useful, but for pure ease of use a real book wins in this situation.