So, I ended up purchasing the third generation Kindle and I am glad that I did. I've had it for a little under a month now. I don't remember the last time I was this happy with one of my "toys." It's actually better than I was expecting, and the downfalls that I have found so far have either been negligible or a workaround has been found.
A few thoughts from a e-reader greenhorn (read with caution):
The Good
The quality is what I expected for such a price. I accidentally dropped it on a wood floor, which has had no ill-effects. I have not felt limited by the keyboard yet; it is fairly intuitive. There are shortcuts(some only found through community posts) to make up for any lack of keys. It is easy to only press the intended key with average sized hands; however, the keys are small enough to make the Kindle not accessible for your grandma with Parkinson's. The display is excellent. I'm amazed at how small I can read words or view small details in images.
E ink is awesome.
The Bad
On the negative side, while there are enough customisation options for reading, there are some additional things that can't be customised which could easily be made customisable. Fortunately, there is a well-made hack out there that allows you to add/remove your own screen savers and supply your own fonts. The Kindle only supports a small number of formats; however, it is easy to get what you need due to there being so many ways to convert from and to any format out there. My main gripe is that books can be organised by collections, but not sub-collections or anything beyond just one layer of any-named folders. Poor show, Amazon, poor show. But, as I said, such things have been negligible so far. It's made for reading and it does that very well.
The Beautiful
The extra features, experimental or otherwise, have been the icing on the cake.
- I haven't had a PDF that was difficult to navigate and view yet.
- The browser works great. Plus, access to EDGE/GPRS and 3G are free(paid by amazon) for the foreseeable future, and free Wi-Fi is becoming more prevalent.
- I find that the speakers for mp3s are surprisingly good. Obviously, I won't be listening to dubstep, but some genres, such as classical, sound pretty good. Having said that, if you have some decent headphones, then the speakers are inessential.
- The image viewer makes reading manga, with the help of an extra
program, easy enough. You can zoom in if you need to, but fullscreen allows for enough detail to not need to, most of the time.
- The built in
not-so-well-advertised games of
Mine Sweeper and
GoMoku are a nice touch.
Any questions, just ask. Although, you can find pretty much anything that you would want to know about the Kindle elsewhere on the net.
However, the cons include the fact that while the E-INK is better there is still a lag in page turning. It's a little frustrating to have a loading screen just so you can turn the page.
Just want to comment on this. Yes, the screen has to refresh on every page turn, but it is so fast(less than a second) that I would be surprised if it is actually an issue for anyone. Furthermore, for any small-to-moderate changes within the screen, it just changes, no refresh.
