[arooni]

Hi folks:

Bought my Kindle Keyboard a year or two ago when it was still called Kindle 3. In any case:

I was reading a PDF two nights ago and everything was going great. Then I decided to turn the page. It had locked up. I tried hitting all the buttons, and then doing the hold for 15 seconds on the power button as I was sure this was just a simple locked problem. It didn't seem to do anything so I went to sleep as I was exhausted.

The next day (today), I noticed the UI had changed to the Library Screen... so *SOMETHING* I did the night before had made that happen; and that gave me some amount of hope that this problem would be fixable. The battery was about 75% when this happened.

I tried a mind numbing number of things to get it working again. Here's a list below:

1) Hold power button for different times: 15, 20, 60 seconds, and even up to 3 minutes with no effect. Did this plugged into my computer (USB), a wall charger (not the official Kindle one but I've always charged off of this without issue).
2) Held the power button for 20 seconds, then held HOME for 60 seconds to try to get it to reset.
3) Opened the back of the case. Checked display cable was firmly attached. Hit the reset button on the PCB multiple times including holding it down for a set of time.
4) Removed the battery for several hours and then tried #1), #2) with no effect.
5) Now I'm charging it in the wall charger (light is still amber) so I'm going to let it charge over night.

When I did hook it up to the computer, Ubuntu didn't recognize it as a device as it had before as a mass storage device; and all I see in dmesg is:

[344164.344169] usb 2-1.2: new high-speed USB device number 19 using ehci_hcd

I'm really hoping there's something I can do; as using the out of warranty replacement (its $85) isn't really a great option seeing as I'm riding my motorcycle from Seattle to Argentina (currently in Colombia) and getting stuff imported to this country really sucks as they have a 26% import tax on anything you send yourself. So buy the time I would send it and ship it to myself I'm looking at about the same price as new... and I'm worried the same thing will happen in the future.

I'd love your thoughts! If I can't make it work; I'm wondering if it might be better to find a cheap ebook reader down here form China instead of buying a replacement.

Best,
David