New Amazon Kindle Experience

I’m an industrial designer and have been using PDA’s in some flavor or another for the last 12 years. My first was a Palm Personal with only enough memory to load part of a book at a time. I read perhaps a 100 books on a greenish-grey screen of 160 pixels square. All of the Arthur Conan Doyle stories, Edgar Rice Burroughs and more. Classic stories and novels that I didn't have time (or money to buy the books) when I was younger. Project Gutenberg became one of my favorite websites. Project Gutenberg

Since then I’ve had many others PDA's, but starting with those that had color LCD screens, none was as satisfying as my grey-scale Handera 330 with its 480x320 screen. It was a bridge to better PDA’s, but those color LCD PDA's were not necessarily better for reading, as folks on the Kindle development team discovered. As I’ve gotten older, reading on screens like my iPod Touch have become more and more of a strain, along with the distractions of a multi-purpose device. It's far too easy to waste time playing Solitaire rather than read. This is one of the reasons I decided to go with the Kindle versus the iPad: the iPad is fine for a go-anywhere tablet-cum-computer, but it's too heavy for an eReader, can't be read in sunlight and costs too much.

The first Kindles to be released were too expensive for me, but by generation three, as we have seen, the price had dropped, features had improved and I felt ready to take the plunge. So far most of my experience has been good. The device is superb for reading books (its intended purpose), at least those that can be read in a linear fashion, like novels. For books that are used in group study where one might be constantly flipping back and forth between pages and paragraphs, not so good, as the pagination with printed copies isn’t the same. Amazon Kindle 3G + WiFi

I’ve been VERY impressed with the screen, both the resolution and the contrast. I thought 800 pixels by 600 pixels wouldn't be good enough, but so far, so good. The readability is wonderful in all kinds of light, even in light that would be too dim for a printed page. Something about the e-Ink screen background surface seems to amplify the available light.

The size is great, though the weight with the lighted cover, at one pound even, is a little more than I would have liked. Still, it’s highly portable and well protected. The lighted cover works well and I don’t have to carry a separate light or worry about batteries. Battery drain when using the lighted cover is another thing: one can really see the indicator drain down.

However, even with the positives, I’ve had some negative experience with spontaneous resets of the device, for no apparent, repeatable reason.

I've experienced what I would call "severe" freezes and resets trying to use PDF's on the K3. I was able to show several PDF's of varying sizes to a coworker one morning, then a spontaneous reset and they were no longer accessible, even though it appeared the files were still list on the Home screen. I assumed they'd been corrupted or something else.

I called Amazon CS, but the lady (though nice) was not able to resolve my issue, because she'd had no experience with PDF issues. I told her that I simply wanted them to be aware of the problem, and she thanked me.

I tried doing a "hard reset" (holding the power switch for 15 or more seconds), but that didn't help. I ended up doing a reset to factory settings (losing all of my loaded books, etc.) and had to reset my Kindle user name on the Managing My Kindle web-page as well as reinstall everything from scratch.

To give this another shot, I printed an email to PDF and mailed that to the Kindle. I have a suspicion that crashes might have something to do with the fact that my PDF's (of varying sizes) were loaded into sub-folders (Collections). I just looked again the small file I emailed works fine, but it's file size is VERY small.

I have reloaded all of the PDF’s that were deleted after the "reset to factory" debacle yesterday. For the time being, I have been VERY careful to open them and not do anything else, letting them open FULLY. So far (knock on wood) they all work, BUT WiFi is off, which in itself is a little weird, as it was on before I established a USB link with my computer and loaded the PDF's. After ejecting the Kindle, it was turned off, as was 3G, which seems to be spotty in my building.

After reading other people’s experiences, I'm actually afraid to turn WiFi back on, for fear it will crash my new, marvelous toy. So far, the files seem to be working, but WiFi is off as well, whether or not it contributes to the problem.

I tried doing some universal word searches, so am guessing that my unit is completely indexed. I have a graphite 3G + WiFi unit with a couple dictionaries, about 18 books, a couple JPG's and one small PDF loaded at the moment. No big, huge collections; no compilations...

I *really* do not want to return my unit and am hoping that there will be a firmware fix for this problem.

I sent a letter to the Kindle team and got an email response back asking me to leave my phone number, so they could call me and set up remote access to my Kindle to see if they can figure out what's happening. Worse-comes-to-worse, I know they'll send out a new unit, but fixing this one would be preferred. More to come...