Ode to the Kindle Keyboard (Kindle 3)

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Posted on . Reading time: 12 mins. Tags: kindle, ereader, ebook.

The Kindle Keyboard is the ebook reader I currently use, and it's probably the oldest piece of tech I regularly use.

Sergi Pons Freixes

In 2010, I got a Kindle Keyboard (aka Kindle 3) as a Christmas gift from my parents. It's still my only ebook reader, and it's probably the oldest piece of technology I regularly use.

Full body photography of the Kindle Keyboard.
It's 14 years old and still works!

The specs

The particular model I own is the one with only Wi-Fi. There was a more expensive option with 3G but at the time — and still nowadays — I saw no reason for that feature.

According to Wikipedia, this model weighs 240 g (8.5 oz on freedom units), with a total size of 190 × 120 × 8.6 mm (7.5 × 4.8 × 0.34 in).

It features a 6-inch screen with a resolution of 600 × 800 pixels, for a density of 167 PPI. It rocks a 16-level grayscale palette.

It has 3GB of storage that I doubt I'll ever fill, a USB 2.0 Micro-B port for charging, speakers, and a 3.5mm headphone. These audio outputs are for a text-to-speech feature that I think I have never used.

And, probably the most shocking feature for young generations, it has a small keyboard. Look at this cutie:

Close up of the keyboard.
A beautiful clicky keyboard with real, physical buttons.

Having that keyboard so readily available emphasized annotating your ebooks. I very rarely do that, but if I did I would love to do it on this device! You can sync these annotations with your Amazon account, so I guess that if you get a new Kindle device you can port them over.

You can also highlight text. An interesting feature — that can be disabled — is to see text that is frequently highlighted by other users — this only works on books bought through Amazon —. And you can decide if you want to share your highlights or not.

If you want an even more simplified marking, you can bookmark pages.

Close up of the screen showing a highlight, annotation and bookmark.
You can list all your notes, highlights and bookmarks for a given book.

All this data — for all the books — can be found on the plain text file My Clippings.txt on the device. Yeah, if you connect it to a computer it will mount like a standard USB drive.

This is the plain text representation of the highlight, annotation, and bookmark shown in the image above:

==========
Dune (Frank Herbert)
- Highlight on Page 2 | Loc. 142-45  | Added on Saturday, January 14, 2023, 04:25 AM

By the half-light of a suspensor lamp, dimmed and hanging near the floor, the awakened boy could see a bulky female shape at his door, standing one step ahead of his mother. The old woman was a witch shadow—hair like matted spiderwebs, hooded ’round darkness of features, eyes like glittering jewels. 
==========
Dune (Frank Herbert)
- Note on Page 4 | Loc. 146  | Added on Saturday, January 14, 2023, 04:31 AM

what a profound statement
==========
Dune (Frank Herbert)
- Bookmark on Page 4 | Loc. 150  | Added on Saturday, January 14, 2023, 04:33 AM


==========

My experience

I love this device. It has been with me for 14 years now.

Yes, I am not a heavy user, but I can still load and read ebooks into it, and it works with Amazon ebooks or standard EPUB and .mobi files. Even PDFs if you feel like it, although these are a bit of a pain as they are formatted for big screens, and they need a lot of zooming and panning around. I tried a couple of times to read a manga where each page was an image, but the screen was a tad too small for it, and having to zoom and pan bothered me too much.

If I buy a book via Amazon it will automatically sync it and add it to the device. If I get the file from somewhere else, I usually use Calibre to load it. If I feel like it, I can send the file as an attachment to a special e-mail account Amazon provided for my device, and it will automagically add it to the device over Wi-Fi.

I only turn on the Wi-Fi when I want to add new books via Amazon services, otherwise, I keep it off. With that, the battery lasts long enough so that I can read a book from start to end without needing to charge. I'm not sure how long it actually lasts because I rarely read two ebooks back to back, but heck, we plug in our phones every night and nobody beats an eye. This 14-year-old device lasts between charges way longer even with heavy use!

The supported Wi-Fi is 802.11bg at 2.4 GHz, and fortunately, that has not been phased out. And for the few MBs an ebook takes, transfer speed is not an issue. And when using Calibre I use USB anyway.

All the clicky buttons still work, even the ones for turning pages which are the ones I've used the most. The "next page" button on the right side feels softer, but that's it. And yes, I said "on the right side", because the same buttons are also on the left side for easy page change if you are holding it with the left hand.

I said I barely use the keyboard, but the extra space and weight do not bother me. It actually serves as a nice extra surface to comfortably hold it.

Turning a page takes about 1 second, and that's good enough for me. The resolution provides very legible text and B&W graphics.

Close up of the screen.
This is perfectly readable. Any blur is because the picture is crap, in reality the text is very crisp.

I can customize between 3 different typefaces, 8 different font sizes, 3 different line spacings, and 3 different words per line. Look at this:

Close up of the screen showing the screen configuration options.
The menu to configure how text is rendered.

The lock screens

I found the lock screen very amusing. Every time you lock it, the screen switches to the portrait of an author or a sketch. Remember that an and electronic ink screen only uses energy when refreshing; keeping content frozen uses zero battery. These are the different lock screens it rotates through:

Close up of the screen showing a lock screen. It has a drawing of the silhouette of a person reading a book under a tree on a hilly landscape. It has text with the definition of the word kindle.
Close up of the screen showing a lock screen. It has a drawing of seven birds on a branch.
Close up of the screen showing a lock screen. It has a drawing of Virginia Woolf.
Close up of the screen showing a lock screen. It has a drawing of Jules Verne.
Close up of the screen showing a lock screen. It has a drawing of some kind of Middle Ages book page.
Close up of the screen showing a lock screen. It has a drawing of Jane Austen.
Close up of the screen showing a lock screen. It has a drawing of Ralph Ellison.
Close up of the screen showing a lock screen. It has a drawing of Harriet Beecher Stowe
Close up of the screen showing a lock screen. It has a drawing of Emily Dickinson.
Close up of the screen showing a lock screen. It has a drawing of an ancient start chart called Ophiucus & Serpens
Close up of the screen showing a lock screen. It has a drawing of two people using some unknown giant device (maybe it measures celestial distances or angles).
Close up of the screen showing a lock screen. It has a drawing of Mark Twain.
Close up of the screen showing a lock screen. It has a drawing of some Roman or middle age's aristocrat woman holding a book with latin text.
Close up of the screen showing a lock screen. It has a drawing of 18 fishes of different size and shape.
Close up of the screen showing a lock screen. It has a drawing of John Steinbeck.
Close up of the screen showing a lock screen. It has a drawing of a man from an unknown old time (maybe victorian?) writing a note.
Close up of the screen showing a lock screen. It has a drawing of a man working or writing on a workshop. There is a dog and what seems a lion sleeping on the floor. It seems to be on some ancient time.
Close up of the screen showing a lock screen. It has a drawing of a Middle Ages man with a heraldic shield in the back.
Close up of the screen showing a lock screen. It has a drawing of Charlotte Bronte.
Close up of the screen showing a lock screen. It has a drawing of a building (maybe Roman?) showing the top view sketch and a slice of the side view.
Close up of the screen showing a lock screen. It has a drawing of Agatha Christie.
Close up of the screen showing a lock screen. It has a drawing of Alexandre Dumas.
Close up of the screen showing a lock screen. It has a drawing of some kind of cyphering machine, with rows of wheels with numbers. It looks ancient, like an invention of Leonardo Da Vinci.
These are all the possible lock screens in order of rotation.

Jailbreaking

The Kindle Keyboard can be jailbroken to customize it or extend its capabilities, but I never felt the need to do it, so I didn't. I have nothing else to say about it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

I'm not buying a new model

I don't see why I should. Everything works. I can read ebooks bought from Amazon or any other platform that offers EPUBs or compatible formats. It performs this function well; I have no complaints about legibility or performance. The only feature from new models I might have missed at some point is the front-lit screen for reading in low light, but it's rare enough for me that it's not a deal-breaker. And I bet that newer models are full of tracking technology.

That makes me wonder how often other people replace their ebook readers, and why. Definitely more frequently than I do, otherwise I don't see how manufacturers could keep up with the high pace of releasing new models. Just looking at the Kindle, I see 5 models were released in 2024, 2 models in 2022, 2 models in 2021, and 2 models in 2019. That's 11 new devices launched during the last 5 years!

It makes me sad that I don't have more devices around me that are this old — yes, I am not counting old stuff inside a storage box that never gets to see the light of day because I don't have real use for it.