gdgt

I decided I had had enough. I'm studying for Cisco certification & have a 90-minute commute. I didn't want to lug those 1000+ page manuals everywhere I went. I wanted something that I could load up with my technical manuals alongside my science fiction and take it on the road. I think the Kindle came very close to the mark.

PDF Support is lacking. Through Amazon's conversion service or with 3rd party add-on hacks you can read a PDF, as long as the page layout isn't interrupted by images or graphics. Then the page turns into something of a puzzle. I was also disappointed to discover that my Cisco PDF manual was copy-protected & couldn't load onto the Kindle at all.

Shopping in the store is dangerously easy. If I were to give into my impulsive bookworm habits, I would have a huge debt with Amazon. It's a good thing my guilt can override this. An example: I was browsing the aisles at a local small bookstore recently when I saw a book I thought would be interesting on the shelf. Instead of grabbing the book off the shelf & taking it to the counter for checkout, I whipped out my Kindle & looked it up in Amazon. It was cheaper there, but I realize that I'm a bad bad man for doing that.

The buttons are my least favorite thing about the Kindle. The joystick is slow to scroll around the page and the buttons are not very intuitive. Sometimes I'm stuck not knowing whether I should hit 'Menu', 'Next Page' or press the joystick. This part needs work.

All in all though, it does what I want it to do and what Bezos & Co intended for this device -- to be a device that disappears in favor of the content you are reading. I don't regret my purchase, but it's not the 'Ultimate' e-book reader. There's much room for improvement.