People who get a bad item or don't like it are way more likely to post about it and/or give it a bad rating than the opposite group. So polls, ratings, forums etc. are all skewed in my opinion. In the case of the new Kindles I think you had a lot of first time ebook reader buyers who were quite frankly not learned in how to use and operate an ebook reader. Stupid is as stupid does. Just like a Sony reader, when a K3 burps it probably can be fixed by not doing the stupid thing you did to cause the burp, or by simply resetting the device. I was amazed at the ignorance level of most of the first time buyers, and some who have bought other readers. There are plenty of cases of user error and stupidity posted about Sony readers as well.

I've owned most of the Kindle models and most of the Sony reader models. I have to say that both brands are rather reliable, but overall I've had many more lockups on Sony readers than on Kindles. I've had my K3 since late August and have had no issues at all. So far my 350 has had no issues either. But the older generation of 300, 600, and 900 would lockup on me quite often. But at most they only required a reset to get them running again.

I truly think some people will return an item the first time it hiccups and without even trying to solve the problem. They then declare the product a bad product. In some cases it is as simple an issue as forgetting to charge the thing or not knowing that if you load a gillion books at once a Kindle will take hours to index all of them and will probably run down the battery if not plugged into the AC. I'm pretty sure a similar issue would occur with a 350 or 650 if you loaded a gillion books at once. These devices have limited processing ability that can be overloaded.