Well, after a bit of a run-around with the couriers, it was delivered about lunch time today. 

First impressions: Screen, wow. Thought it was a sticker but the screen you see when you open the box is a splash screen with instructions is the screen on standby. 

So I followed the instructions and plugged it into the laptop and it installed the drivers but wouldn’t propagate the drive. It was in the device manager and would appear in the drive manager as an empty volume. Reboot of the laptop didn’t fix it so I had to reboot the kindle. 

HINT: To reboot the kindle you press and hold the power button for 15 seconds. The screen will flash a few times and then do its boot sequence. 

This got me quite confused for a while and the kindle wouldn’t go back to home when disconnected from the USB. I had to reboot it to get it to connect properly and to be able to read anything. No biggie, but it had me worried for a few minutes.

I then connected it up to my phone and home’s wifi hotspots and it sync’d up nice and quickly. No hiccups there which was nice. 

Reading the device is nice, on first use however it felt natural to have page forward on the right, and back on the left (not the forward and back on each side like it has for lefties). My personal feelings are that it would be nice to have the left hotkeys for page turning be sized the other way around, larger left arrow over smaller right arrow. This is coming from a right handed person though, others might prefer it the way it is. 

The keys are small but textured slightly rougher than the rest of the unit so feel nice once you get your finger on them. I could see my granddad might have trouble with them, but to be honest he’s never going to use one, and I’m very unlikely to ever use the keyboard for anything serious. 

When reading books with images in them I noticed a slight remnant of the image once I’d moved onto the next page. It didn’t distract me, I was just being picky and looking for it. 

Screen refresh is fine. I’ve never used a kindle (or other) before so couldn’t say if it’s any faster. It’s by no means instant but it’ll do. It seems to flash up a negative image of the forthcoming page and then flash back to the proper view of the page within a fraction of a second. Slow enough that I can tell what’s happening, but fast enough that I don’t care. 

I bought the lighted case for it too. The led lights on the case use the power from the kindle to operate so when the kindle is off, or on standby, the lights won’t work. When on however they seem to work well enough for a small group of led’s. 

It’s very light but built well enough that it doesn’t creak or anything if flexed. The back has a light ‘rubberized’ texture which makes it easy to hold but I’ll keep mine in the case I think. 

When in standby it has a nice selection of random images it throws up which is good. Lets me know it’s on standby and ready to go. 

I used the browser briefly and found it fine. A little tricky without a mouse, but it renders pages in their mobile states so cuts back on images e.t.c. to make life easier. 

Music playing is fine, sounds more than adequate for a small device. You need to remember the hotkeys for playback though as there are none dedicated bar the volume. 


Criticisms: 
I kind of wish the book list had cover images like it does on the PC version but I guess the res. Isn’t quite up to it. 

I wouldn’t mind a line of numeric keys above the keyboard (not sure if other kindles had this). They’re hidden in the ‘sym’ menu with other symbols. No biggie either I guess. 

The case would be nicer if it was held down with magnets over the elastic band it has. Just a personal preference I suppose. 


Some images are below to keep people entertained:

[URL=http://img94.imageshack.us/i/pah53302medium.jpg/][IMG]https://a.imageshack.us/img94/9995/pah53302medium.th.jpg[/IMG][/URL]
[URL=http://img839.imageshack.us/i/pah53312medium.jpg/][IMG]https://a.imageshack.us/img839/4734/pah53312medium.th.jpg[/IMG][/URL]
[URL=http://img713.imageshack.us/i/pah53282medium.jpg/][IMG]https://a.imageshack.us/img713/4136/pah53282medium.th.jpg[/IMG][/URL]
[URL=http://img714.imageshack.us/i/pah53222medium.jpg/][IMG]https://a.imageshack.us/img714/8/pah53222medium.th.jpg[/IMG][/URL]
[URL=http://img824.imageshack.us/i/pah53212medium.jpg/][IMG]https://a.imageshack.us/img824/5695/pah53212medium.th.jpg[/IMG][/URL]
[URL=http://img835.imageshack.us/i/pah53272medium.jpg/][IMG]https://a.imageshack.us/img835/5599/pah53272medium.th.jpg[/IMG][/URL]
[URL=http://img408.imageshack.us/i/pah53262medium.jpg/][IMG]https://a.imageshack.us/img408/5740/pah53262medium.th.jpg[/IMG][/URL]
[URL=http://img826.imageshack.us/i/pah53252medium.jpg/][IMG]https://a.imageshack.us/img826/3137/pah53252medium.th.jpg[/IMG][/URL]
[URL=http://img408.imageshack.us/i/pah53242medium.jpg/][IMG]https://a.imageshack.us/img408/454/pah53242medium.th.jpg[/IMG][/URL]
[URL=http://img97.imageshack.us/i/pah53232medium.jpg/][IMG]https://a.imageshack.us/img97/9979/pah53232medium.th.jpg[/IMG][/URL]