[Trauma Doll]

Hi--as you can see from my posting stats, I'm not much of a regular around here. However, I've been reading ebooks for a very long time (before there were any serious commercial readers--I was one of those people reading bootleg OCR-scanned books on a Palm Pilot back in the day). The upside of this, and the fact that I've owned both the infamous PRS-700 (as pictured in recent threads), and numerous crappy booklights (including the battery-eating Kandle and the various gooseneck ones) means that the slight 'spotlight' effect at the bottom of the PW screen bothers me not a whit. I'm very, very happy to finally have the best 'read in the dark' solution since my Palm Pilot days. I understand people who are bothered by dead pixels (and large dust particles that collected under the screen of my PRS-700 made me crazy), but I'm personally very happy with the display. (I'm also blessed with being a person who doesn't notice blue/yellow/whatever tinges, so there's that.)

What I *AM* struggling with is a lack of intuitiveness with the PW's touch interface, coming from a Kindle 3 where it felt like I had just finally gotten used to the buttons--when to use the back button, when to use the direction-right joystick button, etc. Possibly my broad history with handheld devices, and the fact that I've always got something in my hand (iPad, iPhone, etc) is actually what's throwing me off. The interface, even after the initial tutorial, just isn't quite acting like I'd expect it to based on other previous paradigms (including the touch-interface Sony PRS700 as mentioned above). I suspect this will get better over time with more usage. I've also never used a Kindle touch interface before now (except the Kindle *app* on iOS, which, now that I think about it, is further screwing me up).

I suspect my collection of books on the Cloud is pretty small compared to many of you (3 pages' worth on the actual Amazon site), but navigating/downloading it seems pretty tedious so far. Switching to List view helps a lot. I can also see I'll be spending a lot of time later tonight re-organizing my Collections, as I need them back badly. (Is Calibre still the best solution for this?)

So, short quick out-of-the-box impression: the lighting is fine, especially if you don't let yourself get tricked into being more bothered by it than you would be if you didn't know it was bothering other people. However, the UI, navigation and book-management challenges are preventing the unboxing and start-up from being the ecstatic experience I was hoping for.

UPDATED 10/4: Unfortunately after a little more time playing with it, once I stopped checking out the LED lighting, I realized I have the bluish smudges/clouds along a big sweep of my screen, similar to images posted here and on "Customer Images" on the Amazon product page. Yes, it sucks having to admit my initial impression of the screen was wrong, and I'll probably end up returning it and hoping for a better replacement.