The Guardian via the Net

So following on from my post singing the praises of the i my subscription expires in less than two weeks so I thought I'd try having The Guardian delivered to me via Amazon on to the Kindle app on my Nexus 7 tablet.

They offer a two week free trial after which it's £10 a month, so that's £120 a year compared to the i at £45 a year (although for your £120 a year you do get The Observer on Sunday too unlike the i option which has no Sunday edition (yet)).

I got my first delivery, of The Observer on Sunday and I've had three editions of The Guardian since. So what's my verdict thus far?

Well technically I'm not wildly impressed. Amazon's "Whispernet" technology doesn't work quite as I expected: the paper isn't delivered to my tablet overnight, instead it waits until I bring the Kindle app to the foreground and then, reluctantly, starts the download. So if I'm lying in bed which is about as far from the WAP as you can get in this house, the download takes a while. And there's a bug, either in the paper's design or the Kindle app implementation, which means that if you go into a story start reading it and then press the 'Back' button it doesn't take you back to the summary page but back to first story you read that day. It does this every time and it's very frustrating.

As for reading content on the Nexus 7 it took me a while to realise that if I turned it landscape then a index appeared on the left, however pages are far easier to read in portrait mode. I suspect this all makes a lot more sense on a 10" tablet.

Then you get into the shear logistics of reading. I habitually read the paper as I eat, and often as I cook. It's not a great environment for a tablet. With disposable paper I really don't care.

So all in all although there's a wealth of content, a lot more than in the i, I'm finding it harder and more frustrating to read. And given that I'm going to have to pay almost three times as much to do so this is not an experiment I intend to continue. I'll be cancelling the subscription with Amazon on Saturday and I've just ordered another year's supply of vouchers from the i.