Customer Reviews

The Telegraph

5 star:		(27)
4 star:		(41)
3 star:		(33)
2 star:		(24)
1 star:		(14)

 

 

Having received a new 6" Kindle for Christmas, I am currently trialling the Daily Telegraph subscription. The daily edition is excellent; it is delivered wirelessly to my Kindle at about 3 am(!), and now contains pictures and the Matt cartoon. It is easy to read and to navigate around, and has two major benefits when travelling: (a) it is small and (b) it is clean! Any errors in it are no worse than in Kindle versions of books - e.g. spaces before punctuation, question marks instead of symbols, etc. - and I am aware that this is a problem when a hard copy has been scanned for electronic use.

There is a serious issue with the weekend editions, though. They may appear in the contents list on the Kindle, but when I try to open them the Kindle crashes and I get a message to delete them from the Kindle and download them via USB, which is inconvenient - especially if I'm away. Moreover, having downloaded them, I can read some of the sections (although accessing them is very slow), but if I try to access the magazine or any sections that come after it in the contents list, the Kindle crashes. Last weekend my Kindle crashed 23 times before I gave up and deleted the papers. Today, I have had the same problem; I tried to access the main paper twice and my Kindle crashed twice, so I have already deleted it and will again be buying a hard copy. This is a major problem, and for this reason I am very unlikely to maintain my subscription beyond the trial period.

Currently The Telegraph offers an "e-paper" edition through their website. This is in full colour with all the pictures from the newspaper.

Unfortunately the description from this edition doesn't seem to have changed from when the Kindle edition was being offered to US Kindles. It says that pictures and charts are not included, yet the price is 50% higher than the "e-paper" edition.

I'm hoping that this is because Amazon have simply copied the details of their US offering onto the UK website and that The Telegraph have yet to update how they will deal with delivering their UK newspaper to UK readers using UK Kindles.

They will need to reduce the price to the same as the e-paper (or maybe include a slight premium to take account of the delivery over Whispernet) and increase the content to the same as the e-paper - i.e. to include pictures and charts (in colour for those that read on PC, iPad, etc.)

I was looking forward to getting my Telegraph delivered automatically every day to my new Kindle when it arrives. But I refuse to pay a 50% premium for a cut-down service.

Importantly, since the Kindle now includes a webkit web-browser, Amazon and The Telegraph need to provide a unique selling point to justify why I should pay for a subscription service rather than just use the web-browser and free 3G to browse their website.

UPDATE:

Since my original review, the price has been reduced to the same as the "e-paper" edition. In my view this increases the value-for money substantially and I have therefore awarded an additional star.

What would now be required to score higher? Well I really would like it if a human being actually bothered to read the Kindle edition before posting it for download. Currently the text in many articles is jumbled, with paragraphs (presumably from boxouts in the print version) sometimes appearing randomly in the middle of the body text of stories - sometimes even in the middle of sentences! Also lists and similar text is often not formatted, which makes it difficult to read. A better use of headings, bold and just basic formatting would demonstrate that The Telegraph Group are willing to pay more than lip-service to this edition. Just a bit of care and better presentation would be worth 4 stars in my book.

To get 5 stars would require all of the above along with pictures and tables.

UPDATE 2:

Well it seems that Telegraph Group have been listening. The Kindle version of The Telegraph now has pictures included, and they have obviously changed their process for converting the newspaper into the Kindle format, as it no longer has jumbled text within articles.

As promised above, this means that it now gets a 5 star review from me.

My only remaining niggles are:

1. We don't get Matt's superb cartoons. This is one thing that I really miss from the physical version.

2. The newspaper can now be read on mobile phone versions of the Kindle App (at least on my Android device) - thank you! However why prevent it from being downloaded to the PC versions of the app? Sometimes I don't want to waste the battery life of my phone and don't have my Kindle with me, so it would be nice to be able to download the paper to the PC app for use, for example, on a train journey where mobile internet coverage is patchy, and therefore the Telegraph website is not accessible.

3. There is usually one article each day which is actually made up of a number of smaller stories. For example today there is an article which is listed in the index as "The stamp of history" which is about the new Olympics stamp. However this article actually has 7 completely distinct stories with topics as diverse as pigeons getting into an office through a revolving door, off-road vehicles wrecking a country track and radio stations going back to playing vinyl records. If you weren't interested in the topic of the first story it would be easy to skip over the article and never know about all the other stories. I suggest either splitting out each of these stories into their own articles, or have a separate heading for the whole article which is the same every day (e.g. "In other news...") and draws attention to the fact that this article contains several stories.

I have to say that the new version is a huge improvement. The pictures make a really big difference and the old problems with formatting and typos appear to be a thing if the past. Hurrah!

I'm a bit confused by all the negativity here. For �10 per month, you get a copy of a decent paper delivered every morning, including Saturdays & Sundays, which was a nice suprise. So thats a lot cheaper and more portable than the paper version, and even better when you're by the pool on holiday.

From a quick scan there are over 100 articles on the daily edition and 200+ on the weekend, so it feels pretty comprehensive, and with a paper like the Telegraph you know the content is going to be well written and of a somewhat right of centre political outlook.

So for me, this is great. Good content everyday for a reasonable price and minimal hassle.

Negatives - doesnt have pictures, but so far I'm not really missing them. I want the actual news! doesnt have tables, thats really annoying for things like the football, but I can get that thorugh other means. Fix the pictures/tables in a way that keeps a nice user experience, and it'd be a 5*

Most of the reviews of The Telegraph on Kindle are some months old, with many from 2010. The Telegraph has undergone a major upgrade in the last week or so and there are now good quality photographs, charts and - yes - the Matt cartoon every day. There also seems to be far fewer of those irritating "confusions" where words/sentences/paragraphs jumble together or get placed out of order - no doubt caused by the OCR technology that didn't work too well. Lastly, there seems to be an improved and more comprehensive layout on the index page. This is all excellent - a pleasure to leaf through and outstanding value for money - my wife and I each have Kindles and to get two copies of The Telegraph delivered to the bedroom in time for our morning cuppa for 30p is just brilliant!

At last I got pictures with todays delivery.
What a pleasant differece.
What we now need is "Tabulation" to get:
sport league tables
Finance/Shares information
Currency information.

Let's hope that arrives soon.

Free trial subscription for Telegraph. Weekday issues were great & I loved the convenience of having the paper delivered to my Kindle every morning. However, there's a major glitch (also commented on by other users in the Kindle discussions forum) with weekend issues - they appear to download successfully, but when you try to read them, the Kindle freezes and then crashes. I contacted Kindle suuport & they seem to know there's a problem but are currently unable to solve it. Sadly there isn't much point paying for a subscription to a paper when I simply can't read the weekend issues. Such a shame!

I've been receiving the telegraph since the beginning of 2011. As a train commuter and with a 3G kindle it's perfectly suited to my needs. As of the 2nd December they have started to include images too (even delivered over whispernet). Rather satisfyingly the service continued uninterrupted during a recent holiday to Goa.

Other comments about editorial are right: the content is good but isn't proofread and so there are the occasional foibles.

I'd recommend it.

I'm a bit more positive than most about the Telegraph Kindle edition.
It does what it says on the tin - text, no pictures, and is a compromise between user-friendliness and the fact that it can be delivered worldwide. I was reading mine daily at breakfast on business in the Caribbean recently; I will be doing the same next month in E. Africa. To buy the physical paper in either of these places means tracking one down and then paying over the odds for a three-day-old edition.
It's true that it could be greatly improved. There are many proofreading errors, most likely caused by them using OCR software to scan the finished paper and then simply reformatting the result for Kindle. But then the Telegraph of a couple decades ago was notorious for such basic errors, and was still readable. I also miss the Matt and Alex cartoons, and of course the crossword, but it's more important to me to read the words when I'm in the back of beyond.
The impression I get is that the Telegraph expects most people to buy the iPad edition, and that the Kindle edition is for a tiny minority. If they could be persuaded otherwise it might improve. Meanwhile, as long as I'm travelling I will be subscribing.

I couldn't agree more with the other comments that there's got to be a rethink on the monthly price for this. When you can get the iPad edition of The Times (in full colour and with many enhanced features tailored to the platform) for under a tenner a month, [...] for a baby version of the Telegraph seems at best optimistic, at worst daft.