My friend got a Kindle for Christmas back in December. He originally wanted a different e-reader, but after doing research, despite Kindle being the most popular, I found that not only was the Kindle also considered one of the best, it was also one of the cheapest and best value for the money as well. The screen is absolutely wonderful, I often steal his Kindle for reading on, as it beats using a computer screen any day, it's amazingly light, the battery lasts an eternity, and you can easily page through things one-handedly. It's the e-reader I'd been wanting since I'd first heard of the concept in the 90's.
I'm very jealous, but after months of thought, I decided I had more need for the full computer benefits of a netbook over having a kindle. It's not nearly as comfortable and easy on the eyes to read on a netbook than a kindle, but I needed a new laptop, and who knows, I might get an even better kindle in the future. :P
You can view PDFs and text files with no problem. Unfortunately, it's not an open platform, and even for free books, they want you to use a kindle account and email to transfer things, and if there's a way to transfer your own files via wifi ftp instead of usb and Amazon's whisper crap, I haven't found it yet.
The Kindle 3 is an incredibly designed piece of hardware. Amazon's artificially-imposed limitations are the only real downside. There's no color, but I don't really think that's all that much of an issue in the long run, as I think you'll find you don't have as much need for it as you might think, even when web browsing.
It'd be nice, but having color at the cost of the screen quality would, I think, defeat the purpose of having an e-reader over, say, a netbook, and I don't know if it's worth waiting for color e-ink to be perfected, though that advent could lower the price of monochrome models.
I don't know much about jailbreaking them. Last I researched, I found little of any use at all, though I did manage to learn how to disable the screensaver, but for whatever reason it seems to drain the battery faster. For what it's worth, it wasn't my Kindle, so I never really put too much effort into my research. On the note of battery, you'll want to get into the habit of disabling wifi whenever you don't use it, as my friend just lets it drain the battery. Wifi eats the battery exponentially faster, as the kindle normally only uses energy to change the screen, as it can hold an image indefinitely without using any power thanks to that e-ink.
It even ships with a message right there on the screen, and the screen looks so, well... non-electronic, I guess you could say, that at first we thought it was just one of those stickers they put on the screen like they do with phones! Fascinating stuff! :D
So, yeah. I personally endorse the Kindle. It is awesome. I still like reading from books more, as they may never be able to replace grabbing a book with pages larger than a kindle screen and flipping to a page by feel (unless we end up with book-shaped e-readers with hundreds of flexible e-ink screens within our lifetimes, who knows!), but it's super-portable, you can browse the web and listen to music, and you can read things that you'd normally have to read on your computer or print.
Post edited July 22, 2011 by Skunk
