TECH TITANS AMAZON
The capitalist behemoth’s best ever devices ranked
Keys please me
You wouldn’t have wanted to type an essay on the dinky keys, but they were solid for smashing out quick notes.
All you read is love
The monochrome screen only had a resolution of 800x600, but it was great for reading books. Which was, after all, the point.
01 KINDLE KEYBOARD
The original Kindle sold out in hours, yet it never went beyond the US. That’s just as well, because it was bonkers –like a deranged prototype that had fled the labs at Bezos Towers. Its display was rubbish. The navigation, which used an oddball scrollwheel, was weird. But Amazon was onto something.
The company rapidly iterated, blazing through new models to refine the Kindle’s design and user experience. And a few years in, it unveiled the Kindle Keyboard. The name was terrible; the device was not. This was the sweet spot –when the standard Kindle had all the basics, plus features that would later be redefined as premium.