Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I would never have purchased one of these myself, for reasons I'll go into later, but it so happens I was given one at work to evaluate for free. Never one to turn down a bargain, I accepted eagerly. The device itself rates a solid "eh." The design is not terrible, but it could have been better thought out. The plcement and organization of the controls befuddles me. For example, the beveled edges are almost entirely taken up with two sets of next and previous buttons. Why do we need two sets of the same button? And why are they placed at the edges, where I am constantly pressing them accidentally when I hold the device? Why are the chicklet-sized keys so small, when there is room on the bottom of the device for them to be bigger? And why are they all angled diagonally? Why are the power and wireless switches located on the back, where they are covered when the device is in its leather case? Why is the headphone jack on the bottom, and where in gods name is the SD card slot? I can't even *find* it. None of these is a deal breaker, but they are annoying. Also, the plastic case feels cheap and it's not very attractive. Thankfully, reading E-books is not as difficult as the poor design would indicate. Select a book and use your huge previous and next buttons to page through, that's it. The E-ink display is clear and readable, and it's relatively easy to search, place bookmarks, and look up words. Leaving notes is a bit harder due to the odd keyboard design-you're not going to want to type anything lengthy. Whispernet and the kindle store work extremely well-this is easily the best-thought out feature on the device (I wonder why...). It is easy to connect to the kindle store, and once there, you can read reviews and even download sample chapters for free. It's a shame I won't ever use it. Why not? Kindle uses a proprietary e-book format that isn't readable on any other device, which makes the kindle store and the kindle ebook reader inextricably coupled. It can read files in other formats (text and Mobi), but anything you buy from Amazon will only be readable on the kindle. What the consumer ebook market needs is an ebook version of the MP3 file format: something that's supported by the majority of the ebook reader hardware. Until that happens, you effectively don't own the content you pay for-you can only use it so long as you use the service and the device it's designed to display on, and only so long as that platform and format are supported. One of the reasons I like buying electronic music is because the selection is better than in any physical store. Ebooks, however, have a long way to go in that regard. The Kindle store has better selection than any online ebook store I've been to yet, but there are still titles I can't get in electronic format. So even if I had the money to convert my seven plus bookcases worth of physical books to ebooks, it would be impossible to do so completely. The Kindles other features sounded cool until I really examined them. Sure, it sounds great to get newspapers delivered wirelessly to your kindle...until I remembered that a lot of that stuff is free on the web, and I can already access it on my handheld. It's also worth noting that the e-ink display can't really handle images. You'll either get a grainy greyscale image, or nothing at all. So it's actually better to read newspapers online, where you can see color images and charts. This goes double for magazines, which have lots of glossy photographs. And why, oh why would I pay to read blogs when I can get the content for free via RSS? This is just silly. The device also has a web browser, but trying to surf the web over a slow wireless connection, in greyscale, using a scroll wheel and next and back buttons, in an exercise for a masochist. While it technically has a music player, it lacks even basic functionality such as pause, forward, and back buttons. This is essentially a single-use device-it reads ebooks, and that's all it does. In my opinion, that makes the $400 price tag very hard to justify. Typically, a device that expensive will do lots of things....like an xbox 360 or an iPhone, both of which can be had for that amount. My feeling on the kindle before I had one was "eh," and now that I've used it, I see nothing to make me change my stance. I still have a problem with the proprietary, DRMed-out-the-wazoo file format. I'm unimpressed with the physical design. I see no use for the newspaper and magazine subscriptions, and I consider the blogreading feature to be highway robbery. Don't get me wrong, it's nice to have-I loaded it up with some free ebook content from project gutenberg and am currently working my way through the collected works of Dickens. But at $400, I would never have spent my own money on it.