Well gang, it arrived today, it's unboxed and i've been fooling about for about an hour. First impressions:
It's small! I've never held a kindle before. It's, er, about the size of a nook, which I have. Maybe a little thinner. Very light, I am *so* going to get a case for this thing ASAP, because it's just begging to be broken, though it does still feel surprisingly solid. Also a screen protector seems essential, though it's not a touch screen so there shouldn't be any need to sausage-finger it, better safe than sorry.
I loaded some PDFs via drag/drop on a PC. Amazon, it turns out, charges 15 cents per megabyte if you email it to your kindle and then use the 3g whispernet, so i think i'll be avoiding that. Part of the general sales model is "nickel and dime you everywhere if you're not careful", I think. Not to mention the "dollars and more dollars" model of buying rather expensive ebooks and subscribing to things.
So the PC connection in win7 worked just fine. It rendered all of the PDFs generally very well, including cover art. I'm applying the latest software update to get the most recent additions including PDF zoom, which is stupidly missing in the default, but at least they fixed it with a free update. Also that'll get the twitter and facebook things going, so I can play with those later.
The screen is in fact pretty easy to read. It took a few moments to get used to after staring at a computer screen, but I very quickly adapted. The interface is very tolerable, though still a bit less optimal than it could be. they need to steal someone from apple's human interface design group to streamline things a little more, though it's quite useable.
Page refreshing is faster than i thought, and seems faster than the nook i played with. the black flash of refresh is a little annoying but you get used to it fairly quick. hopefully with future e-readers that will get quicker til it goes away entirely.
Overall, I am fairly impressed right out the door. I downloaded Frankenstein for free from the store via the 3g link and it was done within a minute, quite nice.
I'll continue after I've played with it a bit more.
