Kindle DXG in Paris - first weeks review

[DaH]

Hi everyone,
about a week ago I got me a new Kindle DXG, so here's my first opinion (for those who are in the same undecided situation as I was about a month ago).

The good:
DXG is a lovely thing to have (specially in Paris in times of transportation strike .

The 9" screen is slightly smaller than A4 print area, but roughly equivalent to that of a regular printed manual (most of them are between A5 and A4). Physical dimensions are in the specs, but for me the size is about perfect (only the bezel could be little narrower) and weight is not worth mentioning - I carry it in my regular messenger bag usually with a file of a few A4 papers for work and it seems to be about the same thing.

As for the much mentioned contrast, I have nothing to compare to (my first ebook), but seems satisfactory to me for black (IMO now the problem is not the level of black text, but the "grey" of the background).

PDF Support seems to be OK. It misses some features (more in "the bad"), but rendering is generally close to that of your regular Adobe Reader.

Shipping to France was REALLY quick (I think it was actually shipped from UK), if it wasn't for a few days lost thanks to UPS circling the package around Paris, it could have been there in about 3 days (payed on weekend, first delivery attempt - screwed by UPS - on Wednesday).

The bad:
Well, several things could really be improved. Good news - most of them are software related, so "fixable" - at least in theory.

1. PDF Other than the obviously missing features mentioned already numerous times (Table of Contents, links, notes, etc., none of them bugging me too much), what seems to be a feature (the rendering "as your regular desktop reader") can be sometimes a bit bugging. Did you ever notice that some PDFs are rendered a few shades of grey lighter than complete black, because the author thought it looks better on screen? Well, it doesn't impress nearly as much on Kindle, where all of the sudden all of the text is quite light grey. Still readable, but kind of annoying.
   
   
2. Collections management - thanks God it's there, but it's far from perfect. It's OK if you have a few books, but once you start having nearly a hundred, ordering becomes a bit of a pain (e.g. adding several books from the same author is possible, but might require traversing all the list of books,regardless of the fact that you've already placed them in other collections)
   

The ugly:
Well, the obviously bad thing is having a French registration. Obviously bad is the extra VAT (about 60EUR in my case). Also no WWW access other than en.wikipedia.org (not even amazon.com, only their store app.), so I ended up turning the 3G off completely and only using it rarely when browsing the store for new book. Not much of a pain (the device is anyway not very optimal for WWW usage other than emergency in case you'd forget a laptop/cellphone somewhere).


Questions are welcome, will try to respond if I can. I haven't figured out how to add pictures yet (my first post here), so in case you'd like some, please be patient.

Also in case someone would be interested to see / test the thing in person (AFAIK there is no store around that would have it on display), in general it's OK with me provided the following is met:

-Paris only (preferably city center), with perhaps an exception around RER/Val de Fontenay during weekdays (I work there).

-in general afterworks time during the week is OK or sometimes during weekend

-you'll pay the coffee / beer ;o)

[hellraiser06]

Congrats for the Kindle mate.