Kindle for BlackBerry Review

So I finally decided to download the free version of the Kindle for BlackBerry application to my BlackBerry Curve 8530, the newest version of the Curve, so I could access my Kindle Amazon account on the go. There are some positives and some negatives of this application, with the negatives outweighing the positives, to the point where you will become frustrated with the application.

Downloading the Application

The Kindle for BlackBerry, available for all BlackBerry smartphones, is still in the beta stage, which means that it cannot be found in the BlackBerry App World for download. You will need to log onto Amazon’s website and have the link emailed to your phone. Once you receive the email, you can open the link on your phone and start the download.

The Positives

The list of positives for Kindle for BlackBerry includes the following:

• You can read the books that have been downloaded to your Amazon Kindle account anywhere without having your physical Kindle with you should you forget to pack it for a trip.
• Once you log into your Amazon account through the application you can view all of the books in there.
• Your BlackBerry application will also earmark what page you last left off when reading in the application.
• Page turning can be accomplished using the spacebar on your BlackBerry or the trackball/trackpad. It is easier to use the spacebar to turn the pages. To return to a previous page you hit the shift and spacebar key at the same time.
• The Kindle for BlackBerry application allows you to browse through the Amazon Kindle eBook store. For each book you will see the cover, title, author, price and reader ratings.

The Negatives

The list of negatives for Kindle for BlackBerry includes the following:

• The screens are so small on most BlackBerry smartphones that there is not a lot of text on the screen, somewhere around 11 lines worth of text, which means that you will need to flip to a new page quite often.
• After the application is installed and you log into your account you will need to download each book to your BlackBerry smartphone in order to read it. This can take a couple of minutes, anywhere from 5-15, depending on the size of the book and the speed of your wireless company’s service.
• Since this is the beta version of the application, some pages have bugs that are still being worked on by Amazon, leading to problems with downloading books, loading pages, and the ability to read some pages. This also could have just been a problem with my BlackBerry Curve that might not occur on all other BlackBerry smartphones.

The Kindle for BlackBerry application, the beta version, still has quite a few kinks that need to be fixed before the BlackBerry App World application is released to the world. Once Amazon fixes all these bugs it will become an application that millions of BlackBerry smartphone users will download so they can read on the go.