[BanditoB]

I just got my Scribe yesterday and, so far, the experience hasn’t been all that good.

First, the setup using the iPhone’s Kindle app doesn’t work. I starts by asking you to select the WiFi network that you want to use with the Scribe, but the network SSID for the network that the iPhone is currently connected to doesn’t show up, so there’s nothing to select other than all of the neighbors’ networks. Weird problem. A call to customer service was no help at all. I finally told them that I would just set it up manually and they agreed that was the way to go. I did, however, convince them to try to report the bug to the software team so that it can be addressed. I saw in one of the Scribe review videos that they had the same issue, so I know it’s not just me.

Next, after getting everything set up, my library showed up, but of course, nothing was downloaded. I found out that there is no way to tell a Kindle to download everything. You have to go to Amazon’s website and go under Content and Devices. There you can select your books and queue them for download, but it only allows you to do 25 books at a time, so you have to keep going through the Select All, Deliver to Device, go to the next listing page, rinse and repeat and repeat until you are done. This seems a bit ridiculous to me. The setup process should simply give you the option to download your entire library and there should be a setting that allows you to force a download on the device, too.

So, now I have my entire library on the Scribe, things seem to be okay. I created a Notebook to test out the note taking functions, which are what is advertised and quite limited but very functional for what they do have. I am assuming a lot more features will be coming in the future.

Now that I’m done experimenting, I go to delete the Notebook and it gives me an error, “Sorry cannot delete your To Dos notebook right now, try again.” I tried multiple times, but continued getting the same error message. So, I restarted the Scribe only to get the same error after trying to delete the Notebook again. Another call to customer service and the only recommendation was to reset to factory defaults and start over. I told them that I would consider this, but wasn’t going to do it while on the line with them. I rang off and decided to connect the Scribe to my computer to see if I could find and delete the file(s) that way, but no joy. So, I did the factory reset. After everything came up again and I again forced the download of all my content, the troublesome notebook was the last thing to show up. This time, however, I was able to successfully delete it.

While browsing my content on Amazon’s website, I noted that the notebook doesn’t show up there anywhere. This seems like a rather large oversight. I would think that they would have added a Notebook category for the Scribe, but currently there is nothing.

It really seems like they’ve rushed this out the door to make the holidays.

I hope this doesn’t come off as nothing but a gripe session as that’s not what I intended. So far, I do like the Scribe and I think that it has nowhere to go but up. The hardware seems great, so the software just needs to be developed to take advantage of what the hardware can offer.

The first thing on my list would be handwriting to text conversion. Notes are okay, but searchable notes are really the cat’s pajamas!

I can’t wait to see what will come next year as the software gets updated and new features are added.