Customer Reviews

Financial Times - UK Edition

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I took up the two-week free subscription offer on 27th August 2010. Delivery started the next day. The Kindle automatically selects from Wifi (first choice) and GSM delivery methods and even when overseas on GPRS networks, delivery is smooth and takes only a minute or two maximum from switch on.

No advertisements are included. Thus you might miss an important product or conference announcement. Cartoons, the weather, the crossword, TV programming, some small news items, all the data (including frustratingly the currency tables) are all missing. Only a small number of pictures and graphs are included, and whilst pictures are just of use, they are very small and in the case of graphics the legends are mostly unreadable. There is a facility to enlarge and zoom but I could never master the very slow and awkward process.

On Saturdays, you miss the entire magazine, which is surprising, since it is predominantly a text document.

The formating is good in the main, but the designers seem to have forgotten that the Kindle is page orientated rather than a scrolling reader. This means that page breaks often happen in silly places, for example in the middle of a headline, or in the middle of a long sentence. Ideally they would format paragraphs or at least sentences to be contained on a single page. There are occasional hyphens which end up in the middle of a line,
for example: "head-lines". Sometimes there are text mixups with wrong words or letters appearing for no apparent reason. Although the Kindle is also a browser, hyperlinks in columns like Martin Lukes' do not work.

In summary the design of the FT on the Kindle doesn't yet appear to have been tailored to fulfill the Kindle's potential. For example they have not implemented the hyperlinks, nor is there any easy permanent keyword facility. The page forward mechanism is fine, but a "double click" would better take you to the next article. Etc.

So far, not all good news.

But the surprise is how effective the reading is on the Kindle. Perhaps because of the font size, or even the smallish screen: the absorption of the story seems much higher; I found I could remember much more about the articles afterwards. This might seem a small point but it is really noticable.

A real benefit is that you get free delivery when overseas via the GSM wireless network (3G or GPRS). I went for a short trip in remote rural Andelucia, and found each morning my FT was delivered before dawn with no charge at all! I was miles from anywhere but within GSM coverage. Normally I find it difficult to find the FT outside main cities and to recieve the UK edition first thing for no charge is a real bonus.

All in all, I am staying with my paper copy, (�500 a year; ouch). But for trips away from the UK, I can see a real cost-saving use. For short trips, it would be good if the daily subscription could be turned on and off like a paper subscription can, or if there was say a weekly subscription. As you can guess, I pay for my subscription; if your company's shareholders pay, you may be more relaxed about this!

In summary, I still like my physical copy best. But I would go for the FT on the Kindle when overseas, when on the plane, the train or bus, for reading in bed, or on the beach; perhaps even in a boring meeting!

The subscription comes with a free 14-day trial, so you can try it without cost. The subscription process is simple and works well.

One other niggle; the Kindle seems to have stability problems, freezing-up and either automatically re-booting or needing a tedious manual reset. They need to fix that and I presume Amazon will in due course. (No data/books were lost.)

I really enjoyed waking up and finding my FT on my Kindle to read over breakfast - it works very well, is convenient to use and I think I did read more of it. However, I would have liked to have been able to combine my Kindle subscription with an online subscription rather than having to pay twice for effectively the same content. As the cost of a standard online subscription is the same as for a Kindle subscription but the website has much more functionality it seems better value to have an online subscription. So for now I am not going to confirm my Kindle subscription until there is some kind of joint offering.

Someone clearly takes effort with the Kindle FT but not nearly enough. Too much is missing for too high a price point. This ought to be like shooting fish in a barrel for this publisher. Getting it first thing in the morning is great and it is much easier to navigate with the updated kindle firmware but I wont pay to subsidise early adoption-not when there is so little incentive. Trial cancelled at day seven. Such a shame.

I subscribed to the FT the same day I received my Kindle. Got the first issue within minutes of placing my order. The product has met my exectations as I have been wanting to subscribe to FT for some time but they do not deliver hardcopy papers to my home and with the online version I won't have time to read it until I get home in the evening at which point some of it would be 'old' news.
Pros:
With the Kindle subscription, I open my Kindle in the morning at breakfast or on the train and its there to hand. I do not need to deal with using two hands or folding the newspaper to read and turn pages. The indexing of the articles means I can jump to Markets or UK Companies. The search function is also useful. If I know something is going on at a particular company I can perform a search of the current issue and it will take me directly to the article(s).
The Kindle is also easier on the eyes than the FT coloured hardcopy.

Cons:
You don't get market tables. However that is not a problem for me as I can look at it on the office newspaper copy and if there is a significant movement of note, it would likey be covered by an article anyway.

Also there are no adverts which means you can miss out on important notices, but for the convenience Kindle subscription brings thats a minor trade off.

Overal I'm happy with the product and at > �1 per issue I will definitely be keeping the subscription when the trial offer is over.

Overall this has made my life a LOT easier. I never have the time, or space on my busy tube journey, to physically flick through the entire FT each morning. It is also costly to buy the paper version (think it's �2 per day). Using FT.com is also not an option for me, as most of my commute is underground, and I like to read the paper before I arrive at work. With the Kindle version, I am able to browse and read all the articles, even underground. It delivers itself wirelessly each morning, and I then access it when I'm on the train. I don't read the entire thing - always the front page articles (which are helpfully categorised in a section called `Front page'), the companies and markets section and Lex. All sections are categorised and you can browse through the headlines (with a small intro) for each article. There is also a useful feature that enables you to `clip' articles that are then saved automatically to the clippings section of your kindle so you can store them for easy and future reference. I tend to use this a lot.

There are some drawbacks, which I ought to point out here, although to be honest these are small things. For example, I have heard that not all articles are included - although I think I normally see what I need to. The other drawback is the lack of pictures, graphs etc - although for key articles, pictures are included. I would also like the articles on the kindle version to make some reference to which page they are on in the paper version. Somehow this helps me understand the importance / prominence of each news item. I would also like to be able to browse through the headlines of the entire paper. For example, at the moment I have to browse through the `Companies and Markets' article list, and then `Companies and Markets UK', and then `Companies and Markets World'. I wish these were all in one list.

Overall, what you are getting is the FT - you can read all the important news of the day with little chance of missing anything. If you are the kind of person that likes to sit back with your breakfast and read the paper from cover to cover, this is not for you. For those who are in a rush in the mornings, or have a busy commute, it is ideal - a LOT more convenient than reading a huge paper.

I have downloaded and read the kindle edition of the FT for the last 6 weeks and I find that whilst the sections, navigation and text of the articles are good, the electronic FT often suffers from poor pagination and missing tables. A good example is the money section article on with profits pensions this last weekend, which on the Kindle was missing the tables of best and worst providers. Tables often present key summary or supporting data, and without it the text only versions lacked impact.

The poor level of pagination and the level of missing pictures and tables leaves me wondering if the Kindle FT is produced by automated conversion. The production of the Kindle version of the FT could and should be a lot better quality.

I only buy the FT on a Saturday because it has the best weekend supplement. The Kindle download doesn't include this - no explanation given. Pointless.

Considering the reduction in content the price is astronomical. Think I'll stick to the website subscription.

First, the good bit. While the UK Kindle edition has far less content than the online version of the FT, you will end up getting much more out of the FT if you read it on Kindle. That's because the Kindle format encourages you to work your way through every article in the the paper in turn. Initially I was delighted with it.

Now the problem. As far as I can tell, if you leave your Kindle switched off on a particular day, or at least leave the wireless function switched off, you will not receive the FT edition for that day at all, i.e. it doesn't "catch up" but just downloads the edition for the day you switch the Kindle/wireless back on. That means you don't get all of the content you pay for.

There must be plenty of other busy FT readers like me who, for example, spend long periods on planes and may therefore end up leaving their Kindles, or at least the wireless function switched off on a particular day. For a publication like the FT, it's very important for me to be able to catch up with the previous day's paper if I miss it. Even when I'm not travelling, I'd like to be able to leave wireless switched off on days when I don't have time to look at my Kindle as battery life seems to take a big hit if you leave wireless on all the time.

I'm sure there's some way of playing with the settings to get every day's edition to your PC and then synching it across, but this defeats the whole point of getting a 3G Kindle - i.e. not having to carry a laptop around, and not being a slave to wifi hotspots/suffering high 3G roaming charges.

If it weren't for this stupid major drawback I'd give the FT edition of Kindle at least four stars rather than two.

I compared the Saturday editions and surprisingly I could find more articles on the kindle edition than on the print copy. What was missing on kindle was

1. Magazines FT and 'how to spend it'
2. Stock market price quotes
3. News digest articles.

Pictures and graphs are there on the kindle in black and white and are good quality.

It is easy to use and far easier to turn pages. I get through much more of it on the tube now.