I'll save the suspense: I got my Kindle 2 on Thursday, February 26, and love the thing. As a matter of fact, the night I got it, I was up until 0215 in the morning reading “UR” the new Kindle-only Stephen King novelette until I finished it.
After spending a week with my Kindle, Here are the features I find invaluable:
READING, OF COUSE
I find that actual reading on the device does not tire my eyes, which is something that I was very worried about when I placed the order, since I had never seen a Kindle in person and had no idea what it would be like to actually READ on one for an extended period of time.
INTEGRATED DICTIONARY
I find reading on the Kindle less tiring than reading a book and the INTEGRATED dictionary just kicks butt.
You cursor over to a word whose meaning you’re not quite sure of and the definition of the word pops up in a small rectangle at the bottom of the screen. You can then hit return and get a full dictionary entry for that specific word. The Kindle has the New Oxford English Dictionary built right in.
UNIVERSAL SEARCH
The Kindle allows you to do searches for words across your entire library or in a single book. It pops up a list of the instances where your search term was found and you are a click away from going right to that specific instance in the book.
BOOKMARKS
As you move from item to item in your library, as you enter each one, you are taken right to where you were last reading.
WHISPERNET
Buying content for my Kindle, whether I do it from the Kindle itself or from Amazon's website has been absolutely flawless. In my first week with it I've bought two Stephen King novels, Cory Doctorow's "little Brother" and subscribed to The Wall Street Journal and the All Things Digital blog. Every single transaction has been absolutely flawless and the content seems to appear on my Kindle in well under a minute, even "Bag of Bones" by Stephen King, which is a 762-page printed book.
FREE BASIC WEB ACCESS
The Kindle offers 3G-speed *FREE* web access to Wikipedia and other sites. As a 16-shade black and white device, the browsing is admittedly very rudimentary, but it’s serviceable. Did i mention that the Web access is FREE? You pay no fees, there are no contracts to sign, etc.
CLUTTER REDUCTION
Also, an added side benefit is the clutter reduction in my office as the amount of space taken up by bookshelves and books starts to dwindle as I divest myself of obsolete computer books and reference manuals and start replacing them with current e-book ones.
In a nutshell, I for one and extremely happy with my Kindle and can see the device paying for itself quickly just in the amount of $$$ I will save in paying $10 for a book instead of the typical $18~$22 that most best-seller hard covers go for today.
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