Top critical review
2.0 out of 5 starsExcellent hardware with terrible software.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 10 March 2024
The Amazon Kindle continues to be both an excellent and frustrating eReader that is let down by bad UI design that wastes valuable screen real estate and gives users little options for personalization.
The reader itself is excellent in regards to hardware: perfect size, excellent contrast, amazing background light. It's easy on the eyes, lightweight and provides a very comfortable reading experience.
The one change I would make to the hardware would be to move the sleep/wake button to the top. When reading one handed, as a right handed person, my little finger supports the Kindle from underneath right where the button is, which means I accidentally press it often, frustrating, but it's the only one issue with hardware. I wonder if they do any real life long term testing, it seems like such an obvious thing.
Now regarding the software, the UI is visually appealing but ineffective in many ways. The Home tab is fine, no comments there, it's the Library tab, which shows my books where the many issues are.
The library tab allows for 2 viewing settings to show my books: grid or list.
The grid view shows book covers and I can see 6 at once. I think this is fine, but an option to allow different thumbnail sizes would be excellent, say small, medium or large. This way I could reduce the size of the books covers and see more at once.
Another issue with the grid view is it insists on putting tons of visually obstructing tags over the thumbnails. There's the checkmark at the bottom to show a book is downloaded, there's a "New" tag on top to show recently acquired books and there's a silly percentage ribbon on top to show book progress.
I understand these tags, but they should be totally optional. I'm already dealing with black and white thumbnails that are not ideal for this type of display, why be forced to have to slap all these visually unappealing and obstructive elements on top. It ruins the view esthetically and in some cases literally disrupts the ability to see the information on the book cover thumbnail.
On the other hand the list view is a complete failure. List views are meant to show more information in the same space through text only information (see Windows or any other OS). However the list view here insists on still showing tiny useless thumbnails of book covers next to the the text information which results in being able to see even LESS books at once than grid view. This is unacceptable.
The list view should be a text only view that shows more books at once than the grid view. The tiny book cover thumbnails are completely useless and ruin the whole purpose of such a display system.
Being a black and white screen, covers are sometimes difficult to read even when large, why insist on displaying them this small?
I've been reading on a Kindle since their second generation came out about 15 years ago and it boggles my mind that the UI has these shortcomings at this point. By now it should be refined, customizable and comfortable for everyone, yet still we are imposed these horrid little UI decisions that make the experience far from ideal.
That said, when actually reading a book, the experience is wonderful.
It annoys me greatly because I've loved reading on a Kindle for many years and would like to fully enjoy my experience. These things could be easily fixed with a simple software update, so pretty please, with sugar on top, make these UI features customizable/optional and I will love you forever.
