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I've now had my K3 since monday - my first ereader! Initial impressions were very positive, but I have to say my enthusiasm has cooled a bit in the ensuing days.
My three main gripes are thus:
1. It's shiny! Although fine in bright diffuse daylight, used under artificial light in the evening, I find it very hard to find - and maintain - a reading position that doesn't reflect my reading lightsource as big bright searchlight in the middle of the screen. Even the dark grey bevel, being slightly rounded, seems to catch every available light in the room and throw a big specular highlight at me.
2. It's grey! Again, the dirty grey 'paper' colour is OK in bright daylight, but in shade or under artificial light it becomes annoyingly - well, grey. I find myself constantly shifting reading position to get in a better light only to get blinded by the dreaded reflection!
3. Typography from hell! Perhaps naïvely, I had hoped the Kindle would have better typography than my 10+ year old Palm III. It doesn't. After all, it pretty much uses the same file format as the old Palm. But justified text without hyphenation? And no way to turn off the justification ... C'mon! That is insulting. Especially as it apparently used to be a feature of earlier versions of the Kindle. Hmm.
But lack of hyphenation (and inability to turn off justification) is only the most obvious of the typographical shortcomings. There seems to no widow/orphan support or 'keep options' as they would be called in a dtp app - eg. how many lines of text should always 'keep' with a heading etc. And subscripts/superscripts seem to add an ugly space to the leading.
Although PMN Caecilia is one of my favourite fonts, and works very well on the Kindle, it's, to say the least, miserly to have it as the only serif option. And Helvetica as the only sans-serif ... Again, insulting.
I have other small gripes - the 5-way doodad is pretty fiddly, and the whole thing really slithery when reading bed - but that's the big three.
Ian
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