...a Kindle Touch
For the longest time I considered myself a purist when it came to reading, holding a book in my hands and being able to smell and feel the pages is part of the reading experience. Add to it that since I was a child I will get the most annoying headaches and migraines possible, so the idea of reading from a device while no longer holding a real book was a little far fetch for me. However, once I started college I became familiarized with this technology; and truly, I fell in love with it.
It was a very convenient fix to my problem of an already too heavy backpack. Since my laptop had to go with me everywhere, all I needed was a program that allowed me to read my books while on the go, sort of speak. I discovered the wonders of
Microsoft Reader for PC and it became my number one format for most of my non-college books. Slowly, but surely eBooks began pulling me more and more towards the digital media. Still, I refused to buy an actual reading device on the principle that eBooks where not “real books” and that I will – at some point – buy the ones I really love to add them to my collection (a collection that, at the time, my mother was getting extremely weary of).
After falling into the smartphone trend and discovering the various e-reader apps on the markets I was excited, I no longer needed my laptop in order to read a book. Although is a great convenience to have the apps on the phone it is also mortal to the device’s battery, more than once I have drain a considerably huge chunk of my battery on a single sitting while waiting for my turn at an office. Even though the concept of a smartphone is the ability to multitask while literary on the go, the main reason most people – including me – buy a phone is to have the means to make a call in case of emergencies or when needed; purpose that is defeated after a couple of hours of reading, playing, surfing the net, or using any other of the extra functions available today.
I finally caved; at the beginning of December – after careful consideration, and a lot of research – I gifted myself a
Kindle Touch. The reason I chose Kindle over
Nook, or any other e-reader, was primarily based on the fact that my entire eBook collection is from
Amazon. Actually, before I even started buying eBooks I was buying paperbacks and hardbacks from the same website. I do have to say that the
Nook Simple Touch almost had me with the expandable memory, but in the end Kindle won because, like I said before, my entire book collection is from Amazon; I don’t have a single Barnes & Noble book, so the Kindle Touch was the obvious choice for me. I know, I know, I could have gone for the Kindle Fire, and to be honest, I nearly did. But the Kindle Fire has a few specifications that, considering is a tablet, were a deal breaker for me; the most important being its lack of expandable memory even though is an Android Tablet plus the back lit screen. One of the reasons I decided I was getting an e-reader was for the e-ink capability, which neither the Kindle Fire, nor the Nook Tablet, nor any Tablet in the market for that matter has.
Come December, and I walk into an electronics’ store and I see it, it’s standing on a small rack right beside all the other e-readers and tablets. I couldn’t contain myself; I was planning on ordering it, but now I could have it in my hands in a matter of minutes instead of days and at the same price! After what seem like an eternity waiting in line to pay, I got to my boyfriend’s house and opened my precious.
There are two versions of the Kindle Touch currently available, each one comes with or without “special offers”, which a fancy way of saying it has ads. The Kindle Touch it’s priced at $99.00 with offers (this is the version I bought) and at $139.00 without the special offers. The Kindle Touch 3G it’s priced at $149.00 with offers and $189.00 without them. The devices are exactly the same, the only difference is that whereas the Touch is only Wi-Fi, the Touch 3G has free 3G wireless + Wi-Fi. Personally, I don’t need the 3G, all I need to do is load up the kindle beforehand while home and then don’t have to worry about needing the Wi-Fi. The ads appear while you are either working in some part of the menu or while the device is on standby; not a single ad can be seen while reading a book.
