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 scroll wheel, 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.

OK, we’re mostly talking about the buttons. Those clicky critters, perfectly angled, made it a joy to switch pages – prodding a dead touchscreen can’t compete. Also, the screen was nice and sharp, the 3G connectivity was handy and the battery life was immense. And although the Kindle Keyboard was essentially a single-function device, its audio output added welcome functionality for text-to-speech and audiobook playback.

A year later, the Kindle 4 came to cut the price… and corners. The 3G option and audio were gone. Battery life and storage dropped. And even the removal of the keyboard proved divisive. We now have both cheap and high-end Kindles, but in 2010 you could already have it all. RELEASED 2010