I for one don't think the device is ugly, but I realize lots of people do. Which sorta puzzles me, I mean, if they have a keyboard on this thing, what else could they do with the design? Blackberrys are ugly too, but I don't hear those complaints about them.
Besides, I have a Sony Reader and if you had a keyboard attached to the bottom if it, it would basically look like the Amazon Kindle. PLUS a lot of people complained about the "page" buttons on the Sony Reader, and the Kindle's placement of them seems to be more logical.
Also on the Amazon comments section, it appeared the that many of the negative people were the "but you can't curl up with it by the fire unless it's a paper book" and the "but I miss the smell and history of the books" people.
I also think that for what it does right out of the box, the Kindle is pretty good so far. They have plenty of time to tweak things such as DRM and whatnot for the future. If you read the newsweek article, Jeff Bezos seemed really passionate about it, so I am assuming they will stick with it.
Besides, Sony has a DRM format too. So I don't view this as all that different except that non-DRM'd .mobi files are more numerous than non-DRM'd .lrf files which
I am surprised and somewhat disappointed that DRM'd .mobi files don't work on it but that is something they can change in the future. Of course, I say all of this but I won't have one in my hand until tomorrow--I may end up hating it or something after playing with it for a bit...
