Kindle Review

Kindle

The Kindle is an electronic book created by and sold through Amazon.com. With it, you can download newspapers, magazines and books in under a minute from anywhere in the U.S. You do not need an internet connection; it does this on its own through an agreement with a cellular provider.

The Good

It’s easy to read. You can change the font size to meet your needs.
It can be handy. If I want the San Francisco Chronicle, I just download it.

The Bad

It is very expensive. I paid about $499 and now I think it is $450.

A large part of the face is dedicated to a keyboard that helps you search Amazon….I have had my Kindle for a month and have used the keyboard maybe six times.

My Kindle has crashed twice in the month I have owned it.

All of the controls seem to be in the wrong place. I am constantly changing pages by accident. There are three different keys/bars for changing pages and it is hard not to touch them. The on/off switch is on the back so you have to remove it from its holder to access this…while almost always changing pages in the process.
The page numbers seem to be some type of code that has no value to the reader. One page may be 6547-32 and the next page is 384-94. Makes it hard to remember where you were. You can bookmark a page and I recommend doing it often. My Kindle will only remember where I was in a document if I bookmarked it. Change documents or accidentally press a wrong key and you will spend the next several minutes trying to find where you left off.

The first five books and the first three authors I searched for were not available to the Kindle. There are over 100,000 titles but my experience is that they are all old classics or something that no one wants to read. Nothing best sellerish.
I subscribed to Readers Digest and the first issue it sent me was one I got in the mail over a month ago.

I downloaded a newspaper and they sent me the one from the day before.
I tried to complain but tech support is awful. I could not get a person on the phone so I sent an email and they sent me a standard response indicating that they had not taken the time to read what I had said.

In summary: High price, poor selection, poor software, poor hardware and poor tech support.

I strongly recommend against buying this.

July 10th.
Last week, I was sitting in the San Diego airport. I tried to log onto the Kindle store with my Kindle....no bars. No Bars!!? Come on! I am not at the north pole. I am in the middle of the 6th largest city in the country....no bars.....what a piece of junk.

July 2009,

I gave it a year and it is still junk. I would download stories and the words would run together; no links would work. The selection remains poor. I was ready to drill a hole through it and tote it through airports on the back of my Tumi. In the end, I gave it away to a friend...no charge.

J