The Kindle DX Global Wireless Edition is a large device. It manages to offer a screen that measures 9.7-inches across diagonal corners, giving you more reading area than you'd find in a normal paperback book.

This immediately makes it appealing for those who have difficulty reading small text and who want to emulate as closely as possible the look and feel of reading a real book. It also means the Kindle DX Global Wireless Edition is useful for reading PDF documents which smaller screens often make too cramped to see properly. A screen which rotates as you turn the device in your hands, thanks to an accelerometer, also helps with PDF reading.

Beneath the screen there is a QWERTY keyboard. You'll need this when using the ereader's greatest claim to fame, its HSDPA connection. With this you can go online and purchase books, magazines and newspapers without putting the Kindle anywhere near a PC. We used the system and it worked well, but also showed up a key failing from a UK user's perspective.

You are tied in to buying via Amazon, whose product the Kindle is, and the service has a decidedly American preference. So, when it comes to newspapers you have just one Irish option and six for the UK. The magazines list runs to 39 titles, most of which are geared for the US. In both cases you can buy one-offs or subscribe.

If you live in the US you can try a rudimentary Web browser, but this is not enabled for UK users. Everyone can use a somewhat unsatisfactory text-to-speech engine which is better left alone in our view. Its tinny, American accent and lack of appropriate inflection is irritating.

There is an on-board dictionary. To use this you just have to use the mini joystick that sits on the right long edge of the device to highlight a word. Its definition pops up at the bottom of the screen. The dictionary does ignore a whole host of UK spellings, though.

The Kindle DX Global Wireless Edition plays music, so you can listen to tunes while you read, and it has a 3.5mm headset slot. Do so, though, and you will considerably shorten the battery life. Amazon rates it as good for one week's reading use with wireless turned on, two weeks with it turned off. We found this to be pretty close to the mark.

The large screen and keyboard mean this is a fairly hefty device to carry around - it weighs 530g, and it is far too big for a pocket. We also found it a little unwieldy to hold; we definitely prefer smaller format ereaders. But on the plus side, the reading controls are large and easy to use, and we've already noted the benefits of the sizeable screen.

There is 4GB of built-in memory, and 3.3GB of this is accessible for your own data such as etexts and music. There is no support for additional memory in the form of flash-based storage such as microSD. Still, you should be able to store several thousand books with no problems.

A range of data formats is supported: Kindle (AZW), PDF, TXT, Audible (formats 4, Audible Enhanced (AAX)), MP3, unprotected MOBI, PRC natively; HTML, DOC, RTF, JPEG, GIF, PNG and BMP through conversion.

Verdict
The Amazon Kindle DX Global Wireless Edition is just that bit too large and unwieldy for our taste, and we don't like that we can't use the Web browser as we aren't in the US, nor that the on-board dictionary is American English. The large screen is easy on the eye, though, and we do like the idea of being able to populate it with etexts without a PC.

Company: Amazon

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