Amazon Kindle DX review

Amazon is not Apple. Jeff Bezos is not Steve Jobs. The Kindle is not an iPhone. But there's something about the new large format Kindle DX e-book reader that whiffs of Cupertino.

Perhaps it's the smoothly confident design, perhaps it's the cutting edge tech inside or perhaps it's the arrogance of DRM and the wilful insistence that an entire market follow its lead.

The truth is that, like the iPhone and iPod before it, the Kindle has taken America by storm.

No one knows exactly how many of the e-readers have been sold (estimates range from about 500,000 to 750,000), or how much money Amazon is losing on each one, but that hasn't stopped Bezos doubling its range with the addition of the 9.7-inch Kindle DX.

One thing to clear up immediately is the myth that the DX is some kind of electronic textbook or digital newspaper.

While the 16-shade greyscale screen boasts over 2.5 times the real estate of a Kindle 2, it actually only provides about the same reading area as large paperback – that's a long way from an A4 textbook, let alone a tabloid newspaper.

Having said that, it remains a joy to read, with wonderfully sharp and contrasty text, especially in bright light.

The background is a touch duller and yellower than the original Kindle but the increased size, smoother images and (very slightly) faster page turns more than make up for that. At half a kilo, though, you do need two hands to read it comfortably.

The larger screen also means the battery and wireless icons, page numbers and progress bar all take up proportionally less space than before.

An accelerometer flips the screen orientation automatically from portrait to landscape but it's a bit of a gimmick – the screen is slow to flip, the page formatting usually looks weird, and there aren't convenient Next/Previous Page buttons for horizontal reading.

In fact, the interface overall lags a long way behind UI maestros like Apple.

The small, sharp joystick makes navigating the long pages a real chore and its control buttons are flat and lack positive action.

Add some serious processing lags as the DX struggles to pull up menus or carry out actions and you'll often find yourself hitting a button twice in frustration (and then having to go back and try it again).

Browsing and buying books, newspaper, magazines and blogs over the 3G link remains incredibly simple and fast, with even the heftiest digital tomes arriving in under a minute.

The multifunctional USB/charger connection is fairly nippy, too, sideloading MOBI, PDF and MP3 files in next to no time.

The DX will happily play (unprotected) MOBI ebook files, allowing notes, searching and bookmarks, but it's not so hot on PDFs. These render speedily, have plenty of detail and allow searching but you can't zoom, rotate or add notes – annoying for all those students the DX is supposedly aimed at.

The newspaper mode, while showing just a single story at a time, now lets you search within the paper, as well as browsing section headlines.

There are no adverts and just a few low-res images. Blogs also look fine, as well they should when you're paying a couple of bucks a month for each one rather than just viewing them for free on the all-you-can-surf (or more often, all-you-can-suffer) free web browser.

To be fair, this sluggish, virtually graphic-free browser is billed as 'experimental' and 'basic web', and it's fine for quickly grabbing BBC headlines or looking up something on Wikipedia.

Other gimmicky features include a robotic text-to-speech function that makes your typical sat nav sound positively eloquent and MP3 playback that's surprisingly confident when running through light jazz vocals but collapses into mush when faced with anything more demanding

Oh, and one accessory deserves a special mention. Amazon is selling a leather cover for the Kindle DX that's over-priced ($50, £30) but will look and feel right at home in the boardroom or British Library reading room.

It has a magnet to keep the front cover from flying open and a smart latching system that cradles the DX tenderly but securely: it's well worth the investment if you're going to use the Kindle while out and about.