The Kindle review

My kids gave me a Kindle a year ago for Father's Day. It was not a gadget I had lusted after, and it was a bit of a surprise. It's the cheapest one, with ads. After using it for a year, you'd have to fight me to take it away from me.

• The ads are completely unobtrusive. They are displayed when the Kindle is turned off, and most of the ads are for books. Once you turn it on, you don't see the ads again. So this is a non-issue for me, and makes this low end Kindle a bargain--great for someone on a budget.
• It has no physical keyboard, but you rarely have to use the little virtual popup keyboard, so this is also not an issue. And without a keyboard, the form factor is smaller--which is great.
• It uses e-ink, and has no backlighting. It means that in a dark room, you need to be near a light, but I've never found this to be a problem. It also means the battery lasts for weeks, because it has no backlight, like many of the more expensive Kindles. I don't bother taking the charging cable with me on trips, even week long trips, because the battery life is so long. No backlight also makes it extremely light...another bonus.
• Did I mention it is tiny? Much smaller than a paperback book, which I used to travel with all the time.

What I really like is the ability to walk around with twenty or thirty books in my reading queue, without the weight or the bulk. I've always been a voracious reader, and the Kindle lets me stack up what I want to read at less cost and with much greater convenience. My one gripe is not really about the Kindle itself, but that the airlines won't let us use it (or any other small device) during take off and landing. That is the one big advantage retained by paper books.

I'm skeptical about the whole interference thing. Somebody is pulling our legs on this, as I read these hair-raising reports that the plane's instruments all went haywire but stopped when the person in row 4 turned off their iPhone. Meanwhile, the airlines have replaced many pounds of paper flight documents that the pilots always had to lug around with iPads. Huh? Are our planes really so fragile that the tiny amount of RF energy emitted by a phone or a Kindle can cause a plane to crash? Really? Really?

Laptops are another matter, and there is a different safety issue with them, as they are heavy enough to become a missile if there was severe turbulence or a sudden stop during take off or landing. But it peeves me that I can't read with my Kindle during a large part of many short flights.