No Contest.

That’s the judgment rendered by technology maven David Pogue in his New York Times column evaluating the latest version of Kindle and comparing it to rivals iPad, Nook and Sony. Here’s his pronunciamento: “Certain facts are unassailable: that the new Kindle offers the best E Ink screen, the fastest page turns, the smallest, lightest, thinnest body and the lowest price tag of any e-reader. It’s also the most refined and comfortable.”

Following is a thumbnail sketch of Pogue’s take on Kindle 3 (in his own words):

• The smallness comes in the form of a 21 percent reduction in the dimensions from the previous Kindle…Yet the screen has the same six-inch diagonal measurements as always because they shaved away a lot of that empty beige (or now dark gray) plastic margin…The background gray is a few shades lighter than on any other reader, producing much better contrast behind the black text.
• The Kindle is almost ridiculously lightweight; at 8.5 ounces, it’s a third the weight of the iPad. That’s a big deal for a machine that you want to hold in your hands for hours.
• Then there is the $140 price. That’s for the model with Wi-Fi — a feature new to the Kindle that plays catch-up to the Barnes & Noble Nook…Quite a tumble from the Kindle’s original $400 price, and a tiny sliver of what you would pay for an iPad ($500 and way, way up).
• The Kindle’s catalog of 630,000 current books is 10 times the size of Apple’s.
• E Ink is great for battery life. (Amazon says that on the new Kindle, if you turn off the wireless features, you can read for a month on a single charge.)
• The new Kindle reduces the page-turn wait to well under a second. It’s the fastest page-turner among e-readers.
• The new Kindle’s nonremovable storage now holds twice as many books: 3,500 of them.
• The tiny joystick has been replaced by cellphone-like four-way control buttons, and the page-turn Forward and Back buttons, which flank both edges, are silent now, for the benefit of sleeping spouses. And the new Kindle handles PDF documents much better now; you can even add notes to them and magnify them.

Are there flaws in Kindle 3? Yes. Problems? Some. Invidious comparisons to competitive devices? Sure.  Learn what they are in New Kindle Leaves Rivals Farther Back

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.