Coincidentally, my Kindle arrived today. Absolutely love it--the last Kindle I got to see in person was my dad's, which was from the original batch that sold out in five hours. All I remember thinking was "nice screen, but jeez is this thing huge and ugly."
Well, the Kindle 3 is a lot nicer looking. Great screen, better contrast, better refresh rate, and even lighter than my cell phone.
The screen is so good that when I opened it up and there was text on the screen, I thought it was printed text on a transparency over the screen. Nope, the transparencies were blank--the screen is just so close to paper that I couldn't tell.
The interface is kind of clunky for everything that ISN'T reading a book, to the point where it's much faster for me to whip out my phone and order a Kindle book on there than it is to order it from the Kindle itself. Of course, they both sync thanks to WhisperNet, so wherever I order it, it shows up everywhere. Beats the hell out of traditional books for me. The current behemoth I'm reading is Brian Sanderson's Way of Kings, which is 1000+ pages--that is, it's an absolute pain to carry in my bag, and since I hate writing in books, I also have to carry a notebook to take notes. With the Kindle, I ditch both of them, and my notes are backed up online, on my phone, and on my computer. You can't really beat that.
I love Android, and I love open formats, but the truth is I trust Amazon. I've been using them for years, I expect them to be around forever, and I expect them to eventually do the right thing when problems arise. I definitely don't expect B&N to be around forever.
