Prior to Christmas, Amazon announced their new Kindle e-book and I just had to have one! It was very frustrating to wait and extra 3 weeks from the initial announced arrival date, but was ecstatic when it did.

The box and packaging was very cool. It resembles a book and opened like one!

I was afraid it would be a bulky monster, but was pleasantly surprised to find that it was a nice size and razor thin.

It has this interesting LCD menu selector up the right hand side, controlled by a roller/click wheel. Somehow they made it a silver color instead of black. Popup menus are the standard, with selection controlled by the silver cursor and roller/click wheel.

Here’s me holding it in its faux leather cover. I’ve lived with it now for many weeks, traveling to the east coast and back and think it’s a wonderful device, especially for a book lover/voracious reader such as myself!
Some comments:
1. Reading is tough in low light. The background begins to grey out, reducing contrast with words which are black. Is there no contrast control? I can’t find one.
2. Pictures are inconsistent in books and magazines. Time magazine I cancelled due to no pictures. But I got pictures in a book, Paradox of Choice.
3. Paradox of Choice’s pictures were hard to see detail. How about a zoom?
4. I find myself reading faster than normal, or perhaps the screenfuls are not representative of physical pages and how much they contain. So I feel that flipping pages, or screenfuls, seems to happen more often than physical page flips.
5. Web browsing is really bad. Why not port Firefox to this device?
6. Why not email client at some point? It’s got a full keyboard already. But maybe cost is prohibitive if people were using this device not to buy books but to download email, as the network must have some bundled, expected kbyte estimate per user.
7. Love the instant download through their WhisperNet. Very cool and much better than connecting to a PC every time. Shopping is great through it and love the instant download to the device!
8. Library is early but needs more books! I finished The Lost Fleet: Dauntless and it has two more books in its series and I can’t order Kindle versions! Likewise, I need to get in the habit of checking my Kindle for releases of new books. I just bought Star Wars: Darth Bane: The Rule of Two and Star Trek Excelsior: Forged in Fire in physical form, realized I should have checked my Kindle first and found the Star Trek book but not the Star Wars book. Frustrating!
9. Originally I thought to get rid of my physical magazine subscriptions but I can’t. Don’t know if the Kindle versions have pictures or is faithful to the original. As I mentioned before, I cancelled my Time magazine subscription already due to it just being text only.
10. I’m spoiled by the iPhone! I want to flip pages by swiping on the screen itself and have to keep remembering to hit the button on the side.
11. The leather cover is cool, but why doesn’t it have a secure way to fastening to the Kindle? If you’re not careful, it will fall out of the cover.
12. No PDF support? It would seem to me that would be a natural extension to convert PDFs to their Kindle format.
13. I bought a Theasaurus but can’t seem to figure out how to search it. Weird. Time to call support.
14. I wonder if there is a way for that screen technology to display color images. It has 4 levels of grey right now but would be nice if I could see full color pictures.
15. No note taker?
16. The clippings and annotation technology are really cool. I really like being able to clip pages for my own use later. The other day I emailed some clipped text passages to someone. Very useful and helps to not type the whole passage.
All in all, I’m really enjoying it. I am cruising through books and really like the fact I’m not carrying around physical books, and ordering books is a joy and it satisfies my desire for instant gratification because the book just shows up on my Kindle.