[mentalxfiction]

Well, maybe your friend was in another country at the time when he got it, or somebody brought it over for him? Perhaps his account has as its location the USA? If you really want a K3, there are ways. My only concern would be that Amazon won't sell Kindle ebooks to somebody living in the UAE.

Hmm I'm not sure... I'll ask though then try to figure out what to do from there.

The newest Sony Readers have the best implementation of touchscreens I've seen for ereaders yet. That's pretty much indisputable. Annotation, footnotes and dictionary lookups are, as you can probably imagine, are very easy with a touchscreen interface, and were one of the primary reasons I bought a 350. Fingerprints are surprisingly not a problem, probably because they're not like the glossy screens of LCD-based touchscreen phones, etc. Everything else depends on the person. It allows for excellent tag-based organisation of one's library (not folder-based, but I don't like folder-based anyway). I can read library ebooks with it. I love the reflow feature of the Sonys, which allows one to readjust the text size of novel-type PDFs -- with most other ereaders, your options are to read PDFs in landscape mode, pan and zoom, or convert from PDF to a more ebook-friendly format, all three things which I hate doing. I love the size of the 350. It's really very light and compact, important for me since I use public transport a lot and tend to read when idle.

All of what you mentioned is what's keeping me from buying the Kindle. Especially the bit about the PDF. I read a lot of customer reviews about how reading PDFs can prove to be a chore with the Kindle and I'm probably one of the laziest out there, so fixing the PDF and/or converting it would be extremely irritable.

Those are what made the 350 preferable to me, but I do admit that when buying a Sony Reader, you're paying a premium for features which other ereaders can already do to some extent. For what the Sony Readers can do, they do very well, IMHO, but what they don't do may be enough to discount it for those looking for something a bit cheaper. I had very specific needs, but the Kindle 3 might be a better option for those who want value for money, as it seems to have everything except the kitchen sink.

Hmm, well you have a point. But what is really putting me in a dilemma is the availability of books, as it seems I won't be able to bag a few from the Amazon website if it ends up not selling to the UAE. Though my friend actually has a lot of free books on her Kindle so I'll just ask her how she got them. Edit: Oh wait if Amazon ends up not selling to the UAE then I won't have a Kindle to begin with =/

I do love my little 350 very much, appearance and all, but if you really do find it hideous, I'd advise you against buying it, touchscreens or not.

Maybe it looks bad in the pictures, but I found the Kindle (from the pictures on the Amazon website) a lot better in terms of appearance.

So I guess now all that's left is to ask my friend about the problems regarding the shipping and if & how I can get free books in the Kindle.

Thank you again~ Hope I'm not a bother 'cuz I change my mind a lot.