Screen

I absolutely love the sharpness of the text. It’s not pixelated or jaggy and to me mimics the look of printed text. Under sunlight the screen is easy to read (doesn’t wash out like LCD screens) and interestingly the more light the better the screen looks.

The screen refresh is weird, not wrong, just weird. It flicks and redraws itself. I guess there’s time to turn a physical page anyway with traditional books/magazines.

The contrast of background to text colour is fine until you’re in low light situations and you find yourself drawn to light sources, as above the more light the better the reading.

The time for a page turn (aka screen refresh) makes web surfing nigh on impossible (a moot point here in Australia as browsing outside of the US is limited to wikipedia only).

Killer features

The inbuilt dictionary (displays at bottom of page when you select a word).
The long battery life (48 hours and 2 notches down).
Conversion from doc/pdf to Kindle (send from your email address to the kindle (fee) or back to your email client (free)) is nearly a killer feature (I wish for native PDF).
Searching within a book.
Downloading a book within 60 seconds.

Weight, size and feel

The size and weight are killer features also.

There’s a “chin” to the bottom of the product, where the keyboard buttons are. I originally though this was undesirable but lying in bed resting the “chin” of the Kindle on my chest and it dawns on me. The “chin” exists by design and props itself up making reading easier than a paper novel.

The keyboard isn’t the greatest, but you use it minimally making it not a show stopper.

Audible, MP3, mobi files and text-to-speech

Getting Audible/MP3 onto the Kindle is a breeze, you use the USB cable (supplied) and it’s mounted as a volume then just copy the audio files into the existing folder structure.

3.5mm headphone jack on top. Volume on side. Easy.

Text to speech is so-so as a plus it can be turned up loud, the inbuilt speakers (2) are very strong.

Weakest links

Some of the UI elements are strange to say the least, example: To play text-to-speech press Shift and SYM. There’s no “speech” button or menu item. huh? This goes for trying to find the Web Browser, and in all honesty the Kindle Store should be linked from the Home screen (not from a menu).

By far the weakest link with the Kindle in Australia is gulp the Kindle Store itself.

I was unable to find anything from these authors: Clive Cussler, Bryce Courtney, Dan Brown, Raymond E Fiest.

Furthering the damage, there’s limited selection of books (2) from Neal Stephenson (I wanted to get Cryptonomicon) and Faye Kellerman sees only 3 books.

There’s simply not enough books (though you’re fine if you want to read the Twilight series /sigh) and I feel that Amazon really needs to work hard on the publishers and get more books into the Amazon Kindle Store.

No backlight. Not a curse, but it would have taken it to 11.

Summary

Now I have one (only 48 hours old), would I recommend one? Easily yes, and after thinking heavily price would be the only deciding factor.