What Did Santa Bring You?

Santa was very good to me this year. He brought me a shiny new Kindle. No longer will I feel like I'm out of touch, a step behind everyone else.

Who am I kidding? I will probably always be riding the coattails of trends instead of leading the charge. It's how I operate. Weigh, assess, gather data...think about it some more...and then, maybe, cave.

But, back to the Kindle. I have to say that having the e-ink is wonderful on my eyes. I have my laptop and I have my Ipod touch. Both of which have backlit screens. And while they work to read ebooks, they aren't very comfortable to read from for long periods of time. I've read 4 books since Christmas. And my eyes aren't tired. That's saying something!

There are a few things I'm not so fond of with the Kindle:

I miss my covers. Kindle books do not show the covers! At least not that I've found so far. They show in the Kindle store, but not at the beginning of the story as I've grown used them doing on my Ipod. And not on the home menu either (If I'm wrong, someone please point me to the setting to change this!)

I don't like shopping from the Kindle. I prefer the Ipod/browser interface to the one on the Kindle.

And I have to say, I've finally discovered how fast EDGE coverage is (the secondary coverage outside the Sprint coverage map). It's slow. As in...dial-up slow.  Maybe slower. At home I have the Kindle set to use my wifi network. Which, even as slow dsl, is way way faster than EDGE. But I'm glad I have it anyway, given my husband's chatty nature. I can sit there and buy books while waiting on him wherever he decides to stop and chat in the car. It's awesome.

One last gripe: battery life. They are smoking dope on their specs. Granted, I've been playing Scrabble, have the wireless ON, and have been reading nearly nonstop. But the charge was halfway gone within 2 days. No way would it last 10 days on a single charge. Uh uh. I'm going to experiment with turning the wireless off for battery life to see what the real life range is.

Next up is figuring out how to use Netgalley with the Kindle.

Thank you Santa!