I had a 3G Kindle back in the day (2 years ago), and one of my favourite features as a traveller was the whispernet experimental web browser. It was slow as a dog, but hey, free internet in most countries - the only country I visited that year where it didn't work was Bosnia!

Then it died a sad death.

Now I'm looking at buying a new Kindle, and I'm finding it hard to establish which Kindles - of all the modern variants - still have a web browser with this free slow-as-a-dog internet available? Fire? Touch? Others?

  • The Kindle Touch does provide free 3G in most countries but it only provides access to the Amazon website and Wikipedia. – Nathan Osman Dec 20 '13 at 9:11

I have various Kindles including: My Kindle Fire first model, second edition, WiFi - it can access any web site over wifi My Kindle 4 WiFi and Kindle 5 WiFi can also access any site over wifi

My Kindle Paperwhite 3G can access Wikipedia.com over 3G. It asks for a WiFi connection to visit sites such as google.com This concurs with Nathan Osman's comment on your question.

So in answer to your question, all the kindle models I have include a web browser. They can access most sites using WiFi, however the newer 3G models are restricted to wikipedia and amazon by Amazon.

PS: Even on the older Kindle Keyboard 3G models I found they sometimes asked for WiFi when I tried to visit sites after a while. However if I first visited the Amazon store then the 3G connection worked correctly for other web sites. I tried this approach on the Paperwhite 3G however I was still asked for a WiFi connection when visiting sites such as Google so there seems to be a policy-based restriction on newer models (possibly to save Amazon from data charges?)

Your Answer

