Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

The Kindle Paperwhite is a good product and I certainly loved mine to death. This morning I woke up, read a few pages of a book and my kindle rebooted itself, as they do from time to time. No big deal, I figured I would just wait until it finished and go back to reading. My poor kindle never came back from its reboot, it remained stuck on the kindle reboot screen approximately 50% of the way through booting. I plugged it into the wall for 10+ hours and attempted the hard restart procedure countless times but the device never restarted again or made any response. I purchased my kindle in February 2013, so while it is not the newest of devices, it certainly is not old either. I decided to call Amazon customer service to see if there was something that could be done. The agent took me through the hard reset procedure and then stated that the only thing she could do is offer me a discount on my next device, she offered me a Kindle Paperwhite 3G for $20 off of the current price (my device is the Wifi) or a Kindle Fire for about the same. Frustrated, I hung up. I am a computer engineer by training so I took the device into my garage and disassembled it. I removed the front bezel and popped the battery out. After depressing the power button with the battery removed and replacing the battery, I was able to get the indicator lights on the bezel to light briefly. Initially the screen would flash white and then return to the kindle boot screen but with no further activity. So I hooked the device up to a linux pc and repeated the procedure now, the Kindle is seen via USB and the file system can be mounted before the device powers off again. I also noticed that the orange charge light will now turn on and the kindle boot screen will start draw a few frames of an animated whirl loading symbol at the bottom. I bet if I let the device sit for a few hours it might work again. I will update this review if anything changes. So here is the short version of my review. The device is amazing and worked majestically for 2 years and a month. Today for no apparent reason the device bricked itself and none of the steps provided by customer service or online would make it come back. Amazon customer service refused to accept the device back for repair. I disassembled the device and found that with a simple removal of the battery I was able to restore some function. I suspect that this device (or at least my hardware revision of it) has a faulty charge controller which I was able to reset by removing the battery. I suspect the Amazon engineers have fixed this in more recent versions but buyer beware. ** Update ** After numerous cycles of removing the battery, pressing the power button, replacing the battery, plugging in the device and pressing the power battery I was able to restore my device to full function. I fully believe that there is a defective charger controller and Amazon should replace the affected devices instead of telling people to buy new ones.