[tgnd]

I got my kindle in my grubby impatient paws on the 25th of Jan and immediately plugged it in since it arrived completely out of battery. I started reading about an hour later while letting it charge fully till fairly late that night. It seemed like within a week or so battery was starting to look pretty low so I charged it overnight. During that week I think I had 3G/Wifi on about half the time and used it here and there for 10 - 15 minutes at a time.

The next charge lasted me about 10 days with Wifi/3G kept off except when in use. Again, I didn't use it that much.. 10 - 15 minutes here and there maybe a couple of times a day.

This last charge has lasted me 10 days since I fully charged it, including a 1 hour charge 4 days ago when I was in a coffee shop reading and the battery started showing pretty low. Then yesterday it popped up the warning again telling me the battery was depleted. So once again I set it to charge overnight. During this last 10 days I made sure wifi was always off and made sure to turn it on the absolute minimum amount of time - I only tuned it on 3 times during the week, just long enough to email files to myself twice and once to download about 6 free books I had purchased earlier in the day.

In the last 24 hours I read a book of about 5000 locations with 8 locations a page (I use the next to smallest text size so it's not like I'm turning pages constantly the entire time I was reading) and the battery is already showing partially used (the first notch down from full).

All this seems to go very much against the idea of a single charge lasting 30 days as I read. I mean, I don't expect the average charge to last 30 days, I realize that is best case scenario, but I think 3 full charges and a partial charge (plus a few minutes of charging via USB here and there that I'm not even counting) in 27 days is pretty crappy compared to that. One of the selling points for me was the long battery life as I am notorious for forgetting to charge my gadgets until I actually need them.

All of this is on a naked kindle - no lighted cover or anything, I simply store mine in a fabric sleeve when it's not in use. I've read about issues with it sometimes getting hung up on indexing and tried the search for a random string and gotten no results, meaning that indexing is not the problem.

Have I gotten a dud? Do I need to just call amazon and expect them to replace it for me? Is this a situation where they might try to foist a refurbished unit off on me? I'm no longer within my 30 days from ordering, but I am at 29 days from receiving it, so I'm not sure where I fall in the greater scheme of things. I'd appreciate some feedback so I can decide what my next step to take is. I know this much - I NEED my kindle now. I can't imagine not owning one any more - I've read as much in the last 4 weeks on it as I did in the second half of last year, and found a dozen other uses for it besides plain old reading.