My new Kindle 3G reached me at my San Diego County home two days ahead of Amazon's estimate. I enjoyed getting it all set up and loaded with some books I want to read now plus plenty of free stuff for "later." Overall I'm really enjoying it, and excited about getting some of my personal stuff on it, and getting some books from work converted to the Kindle's e-book format.
Last night we, along with most other San Diegans, suffered a long-lasting power outage. I was easily able to find news about the outage via my Kindle's web browser (Internet was out at work and home...routers need electricity). I found the light built into my Kindle's cover worked great.
Some negative observations:
- I find navigating with buttons kludgy, making a touchscreen seem more attractive. But I also find I accidentally hit the page turn buttons more often than I thought I would, and wonder how often I'd be accidentally hitting hot spots on a touch screen. Hmm.
- I'm astounded at the poor quality of most e-books on Amazon (remember, I've been "buying" a lot of the free and 99 cent stuff). But even some of the full-price stuff seems to be scanned PDF's, or doesn't have a linked table of contents, or just obviously was not edited by a real person before being put up for sale. But I find that when I start actually reading a book, I manage to forget about what a bad scan job was done as I get immersed into the content.
- With all the talk about how e-ink screens don't suffer from glare like backlit screens do, I thought there would be less glare.
- I'm frustrated at how complicated it is to create content for the Kindle, and how complicated it is to convert documents. I'm doing all kinds of google searching, downloading, trying to find instructions for using tools, etc. Please share info on your favorite HTML wysiwyg+code view editors!
Just because I'm lovin' it, doesn't mean I haven't experienced those negatives! I still recommend buying the Kindle now rather than waiting for the new models, unless there's some specific feature you want the current models don't have (e.g. color screen, touch screen). I've changed over the years from owning bleeding-edge technology to owning tried-and-true stuff; as 4G smart phones started coming out, I snatched up the most successful 3G model, I like to buy one or two generations from the latest, etc., and I'm happy with the current "mature" Kindle model.