When I first got my Kindle 1 it would crash every so often when reading books. Then 1.0.4 came out and I never saw another crash. (then the poor thing tried to upgrade itself to 1.2 and died in the process, since replaced by Amazon)

Now I've had my Kindle 2 a few days and I've already had my first crash (while reading Use of Weapons) so I'm guessing the old adage about never buying revision 1.0 of anything still applies.

I wasn't using anything fancy at the time of the crash, just flipping along and then it froze and went back to the home screen. Re-opening the same book took me back to precisely where I'd been the last time I opened it.

I've had around 3 lock ups so far. Everything just froze. Turning off and back on via the 15 second slide of the power switch brought everything back.

You should call Amazon and see what they have to say about it. Seems to be numerous people having the same issue

I got the Kindle on Friday. It seems to have a lot of problems. It freezes consistently - no matter what I am doing. I called Amazon - after rebooting it worked for awhile and then freezes when I am reading. Is anyone else having this problem? I know if you hold the start key in the on position for about 15 seconds that it reboots. The woman from Amazon also got to a screen where you could start all over again - put the Kindle back to its original defaults. I cannot seem to find that screen again. Help!! I wonder if I should recall Amazon.

The woman from Amazon also got to a screen where you could start all over again - put the Kindle back to its original defaults. I cannot seem to find that screen again. Help!! I wonder if I should recall Amazon.

While you're on the Home Page, press Menu, 5-way to Settings, when you're on the Settings page, press Menu again and that will give you the option of putting the Kindle back to its original defaults.

Jim

While you're on the Home Page, press Menu, 5-way to Settings, when you're on the Settings page, press Menu again and that will give you the option of putting the Kindle back to its original defaults.

Jim


Thank you. I hope I don't have to do that very often.

Mine froze today in the middle of Use of Weapons as well. I finally got it to reboot.
Some questions:
1) Anyone else bothered by the extremely short battery life before recharging is necessary?
2) Has anyone else noticed that the screen contrast is much worse than when it came out of the box? (Either that or my eyes are going <grin>)
Jim

If you've put a number of books on your Kindle it will spend a lot of time indexing the books and that eats up the battery. Also, leaving the wireless on uses the battery faster. Before I loaded up mine with 2000 books (sort of a stress test) the battery stayed charged for close to 5 days with intermittent use of the wireless.

Is anyone having this problem with the battery? And should I call amazon for this:

After fully charging my K2, the wireless is off and the K2 is off. Two days later - after not having turned it on to read, even once - the battery is critically low and must be recharged.

I have about 50 books on there. No wireless turned on and it was turned off with a full charge. Has anyone else experienced this?

See if that is a pattern (battery runs down with no usage) or a one-time thing. When you first put the books on, it has to index them, so you can do "search" on all sorts of weird words. Also, the first charge is said to require an overnight charge, even if the light has already turned green.

Thanks for the reply badgoodDeb. It's been charged several times, including overnight, but I will pay attention and see if it occurs again. It's entirely possible my 10 year old son may have been using it.

He, too, is a book fiend and I made the mistake of showing it to him and how it works when it first came in. He was reading some of my classics on it in the dentist's waiting room a week or two ago. He knows it was in my "take-to-work" bag and may have been reading on he sly. I catch him up at 2:00 and 3:00 a.m. reading. I was the same way, so I can't complain. At least it's books and not TV!

I may be able to put it to some timed usage too.

Thanks again!

Ah-HAH!! Well, train 'em up right, and all that. Books are a good thing to be addicted to. Ask anybody on this web site!! :D

I have not seen any crashes at all. The only issue that I saw was associated with the 2.0.1 download and install. My screen flashed a couple times and I didn't know what it was doing until I checked the settings page.

As for the battery:

I have charged my K2 twice since getting it on the 26th. The first time right out of the box and then I used my K2 every day, using the wireless to download and occasionally browse the web to show friends and family. My next charge came on the 6th after I received a low battery notice. I charged overnight and once again have used it every day with wireless used to download only. It is now the 12th and I would estimate that I have a little over 2/3 charge left.

I have been keeping a pretty good track on the battery life since it seemed to be an issue for the K1's.

Overall, I am more than satisfied with the battery life. I figure I could go 2 weeks on a charge if I was mainly reading and limiting my wireless time.

I plan on keeping track for the next month or so for a good baseline for comparison in the future.

I figured out what's killing my battery is the wireless. 36 hours max with wireless on. Turn it off and I've gotten over a week.

Ive read about 8 books since I got my k2, not one crash or lock up.

My Kindle 2 has an odd quirk; when I push the menu button to get to the menu, often the menu will appear, flash once or twice, and disappear again before I can pick a choice. Those times when I've had sufficient presence of mind to try to use the joystick while the menu was flashing, it didn't appear to move the selection on the menu before the menu disappeared. Does anybody know what may be causing this? I thought for a while it had to do with whether the cursor was visible on the page before I triggered the menu, but then I had it happen both ways, and now I don't know what's going on anymore. So far I have managed to get around it by just pressing the menu button over and over until the menu stayed, but it's a bit of a nuisance.

Did you take the protective covering off the joystick so it isn't being pressed when you only mean to jog it?

BOb

Did you take the protective covering off the joystick so it isn't being pressed when you only mean to jog it?

BOb

Um. The Kindle came with a sort of sticky plastic sheet that covered the entire face of it, screen, keyboard, joystick and all. I took that off first thing. There doesn't seem to be anything special over the joystick itself, that I can see.

Plus I'm reaching the menu by pushing the menu button, rather than the joystick. The menu sometimes flashing and disappearing seems to happen even when I don't try to use the joystick to pick anything--so even when I'm not touching the joystick at all.

I'm beginning to wonder if some part of the internal workings of the menu button is "sticky"--acting as if the menu button is being held down when it's not.

If nobody else is seeing this phenomenon, maybe it's time for me to call Kindle support... (sigh) I purely hate the thought of having to give up my lovely Kindle, though.

That doesn't seem normal. If you are sure you aren't double-bouncing the menu key, I say call them. They will usually send you a new Kindle *before* asking for the existing one back. You send it back in the package the new one ships in.

When you first put the books on, it has to index them, so you can do "search" on all sorts of weird words.

I can understand the rapidly draining battery as the Kindle performs its initial index. However, I saw a second (and more concerning issue) after adding ~50 .mobi-formatted eBooks to my Kindle 2. The unit seemed to either lock up (no response to any button presses) or restart frequently after I copied these files over (say 3-5 times in a 6 hour period). They were converted to mobi from HTML and LIT-format books via Calibre. After about 24 hours of this, I reset the unit to defaults and haven't copied these converted units back to the Kindle. All seems to behave normal right now. Have you see, or would you consider, this to be the "normal" behavior?

I've had some lockups when trying to do searches or use the web while it's indexing lots of books. But restarting works fine and the Kindle picks up where it left off. More recently, I found it crashes a *lot* when it's indexing and it gets low on space (< 50MB) and you try to do a search or enable text-to-speech. So now I'm trying to keep about 100MB free at all times.

But loading 50 MOBI books on? You should be fine with that; go ahead and do it and just let the Kindle finish indexing them (it indexes a typical book between 15 seconds and 2 minutes).