The feel, weight, ergonomics and screen are great. I also didn't realize when I bought it that it comes with a free-ish always-on wireless connection - which makes browsing and buying books really easy. The battery life was decent. After a normal-length wait at the airport and then a 6 hour flight, I was out of juice.
The device is for reading e-books, it teases you that it can do more, like the experimental web browser and MP3 player. But at the end of the day, if you're happy with it as an e-book reader you'll be quite happy with it overall. If you want it to be a tablet netbook then you'll be quite disappointed. It is what it is.
That said, my one big beef is that it doesn't really handle PDFs. I can live with a dedicated device, but so much of what I read comes to me in PDF form that it'd be really, really nice to be able to drop those on to the Kindle and read them on-the-go. This dream will have to wait for a future version. You can do some PDF-to-ebook conversion stuff with software like Mobipocket or Stanza (I played with both) - but images and data tables get garbled, and for many PDFs those are really the best part of the content.
As a book reader it's great and I'm very satisfied with my purchase.
Don't have a Kindle but heard about this PDF converter on today's episode of GeekBrief.tv. Perhaps something to try.
http://www.download.com/8301-2007_4-10187502-12.html
Posted by: Brian McNitt | March 06, 2009 at 10:28 AM