Kinder Kindle

[tamaranth]

Having encountered the highlight / freeze / screen weirdness problem on three consecutive Kindles-with-keyboards, my last conversation with Amazon went roughly "DO NOT SEND ME A NEW ONE GIVE ME A REFUND". (At this point I should mention that my third Kindle-with-keyboard had taken four days to crash -- three of which I'd spent laboriously restoring content. I was not happy.)

So they gave me a refund.

And with my refund I bought a new Kindle.

This is the £89 model, no keyboard: so far (rather less than 24 hours) I like it a lot.
- the physical device feels more robust: it doesn't creak or flex like the old one
- I do not miss the keyboard at all. The point-and-click keyboard function is perfectly adequate for entering passwords and naming collections.
- the highlighting problem has not yet occurred, yay!
- paging is much faster.
- this Kindle is running version 4 of the Kindle software -- the highest my Kindle-with-keyboard(s) could aspire to was 3.3.
- the 'screensavers' are different: photos of writing-related thingies (pencil-points, typewriter keys) instead of frontispieces from old books. I do miss the old artwork.

Amazon need to work on their 'manage personal documents' app. I'm ever so pleased that I can access and reload documents I've created since the end of September: however, as there are nearly 500 of them, I'd like batch operations (delete, reload to Kindle) and maybe the option of renaming.

Comments

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

Reading this with interest, because my first Kindle basically did the smashed glass looking screen thing, as far as I can tell while sitting overnight on my bedside table. They replaced it, and I need to phone them today because the replacement simply doesn't work. When you charge it fully, it appears to work fine for five minutes or so, and then starts to hang every time you change a page, just for a few seconds. If you start it other than having charged it fully, it doesn't start and needs resetting.

I am becoming weary.

[tamaranth.livejournal.com]

'Weary' is exactly it -- well, that and 'really pissed off'. My Kindle represents a big investment of time and money (not just the initial hardware, but ebooks and all the documents I've created myself, plus all the categorising) and I wasn't prepared to jump through the replace - malfunction - replace hoop any more.

Definitely recommend 'downgrading' to the new one, albeit without having had mine very long. It's probably just the new OS, but it seems so much more responsive and well-behaved!

[madcatwoman.livejournal.com]

I'm glad you posted this. I'm considering getting a Kindle, and happy to see that the new version is better than the more expensive version. I think you've helped me to make up my mind!