Kindle Keyboardbrowser
| Screen resolution | 600 × 800, 16 shades of gray |
| Viewport size | 582 × 706 |
| Browser | WebKit-powered |
| User Agent | Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; en-US) AppleWebKit/528.5+ (KHTML, like Gecko, Safari/528.5+) Version/4.0 Kindle/3.0 (screen 600x800; rotate) |
| Acid3 | 99/100 |
| HTML5 Test | 59/555 |
| CSS3 Test | 35% |
Kindle Keyboard (aka Kindle 3) is an e-book reader by Amazon with e-ink (not touch) screen and an experimental browser on board.
It has Wi-Fi and optional 3G. When it first came out, Amazon provided free 3G around the globe, but then it was limited to Wikipedia and Amazon’s website. Wi-Fi is, needless to say, still unlimited.
The browser doesn’t have multiple windows or tabs. D-pad is used to move the cursor, back button (under the d-pad) – to go back through the history, buttons on the sides of the device act as Page Up and Page Down.
The browser works fine with javascript, copes well with medium complexity pages, but slowes significantly when dealing with big amounts of high-res pics (supposedly due to the lack of RAM).
Feature tests
Feature tests are done using Modernizr. Full table of my tests on google docs.
| Feature | Test | Actual result |
|---|---|---|
| backgroundsize | True | True |
| bgsizecover | False | False |
| borderradius | True | True (-webkit-) |
| boxshadow | True | False |
| boxsizing | True | True (-webkit-) |
| cssanimations | True | True (-webkit-) |
| cssgradients | True | False |
| csstransforms | True | True (-webkit-) |
| csstransforms3d | False | True (-webkit-) |
| csstransitions | True | True (-webkit-) |
| fontface | True | True (.svg only) |
| mediaqueries | True | True |
| opacity | True | True |
| rgba | True | True |
| textshadow | True | True (no blur) |
| touch | False | False |
| video | False | False |
Amusingly enough, it supports animations and transitions. Animation quality is accurately captured on the screenshot (although the nature of badly rendered animation on the screenshot is progressive reading, whereas on the screen it’s e-paper’s response time):
Zoom
Websites not optimized for mobile devices are shown "zoomed-out", while the cursor is replaced with a zooming frame:
Back button brings you back from zoomed-in to zoomed-out view.
Links
All the links forcibly receive text-decoration: underline. It cannot be overridden neither by !important, nor through javascript.
Links with target="_blank" don’t work, instead a warning is shown:
Fonts
The only supported format for external fotns is SVG. Original Font Awesome doesn’t works for some reason, although it works just fine when generated with Icomoon app.
Scroll
Internal blocks are scrollable with the cursor: it sticks to the edge of the block until the block is scrolled to the end in a particular direction:
Forms
New input types are not supported, no validation is implemented.
Conclusion
Not too shabby for an e-book reader. Virtually no problems showing mobile and adaptive websites.
You may use html.bw selector in conjunction with sniffer.js to play around with the colors and disable animations for Kindle users (if you are desperate about such things).