After moving from a sony PRS-505, this is my take:
I have received my Kindle in the UK at the new lower price (£209 inc. delivery and duty), apparently it’s the number 1 best selling item on Amazon now!
It really is a breakthrough device. Surprisingly not really for techies to have another gadget but I think quite appropriate for dusty bookworm types.
The 3G connection is free, so I have spent literally hours just browsing books in the store and reading reviews, which is a quite enjoyable activity all on its own.
Out of the 400-450k books available, only about 325k are available in the UK due to copyright reasons, excluding one which I really wanted
Its much smaller that I thought it would be which is great. If I could redesign it, the main thing I would do is add an extra inch to the screen whilst keeping the same overall dimensions.
I can’t emphasise the breakthrough in the constant connection (in any country, which you don’t pay for). Having newspapers auto delivered early in the morning, having books delivered instantly is going to change the way Humans’ interact with information and received wisdom.
There is an archive feature which is very clever. You can basically have as many books as you want in the archive (which is an Amazon central storage). They are listed in the contents page like books that are physically on your device. When you want to read them they instantly come into the device. This means that the 2gb memory is not really a limit.
I am using the open-source calibre software for free news feeds and to manage books on the device, but this can also be done from the Amazon web interface. I can also send books to the device by emailing
xxx@kindle.com ($0.99 per MB) or
xxx@free.kindle.com (free) where they come into the kindle when I connect to a PC with the USB cable and sync.
Very happy! Its a new world