Kindle 2: First Impressions

I was asleep when I heard a knock at the door. I knew it was UPS. I jumped up and threw some clothes on but by the time I got to the door, they had gone. I ran down the hall to the elevator. I had just missed them. Caught the next elevator and caught them in the lobby of my apartment building just as they were leaving. Phew! I had my Kindle 2.

I didn't have the original Kindle and I've never used any kind of electronic reader so this was a new experience for me. I love books and own A LOT of them. But spending time on three continents, at conferences and on airplanes means I'm looking forward to more books at my fingertips and avoiding the agony of "which 0.1% of my books can I take with me on this flight".

Here are my first impressions:

• they put thought into the unpackaging experience
• even though I've seen the photos, it still seemed smaller once I held it in my hand than I thought it would be
• the Amazon leather cover I bought adds a bit of weight and bulk to the device
• the fact the screen can show stuff while the device is turned off freaked me out at first
• the device is comfortable to hold and I imagine being able to read for long periods with this
• as an electronic-ink newbie, I was very impressed by the readability of the screen
• I didn't like the font when I first looked at it but once I started reading it didn't bother me
• it worked out of the box, was linked to my Amazon account and had a book I'd bought before the device arrived
• knowing how far I am through a book as a percentage is a little freaky at times
• it took me a little while to get the handle of the navigation (beyond basic turn pages, which is easy)
• text-to-speech is impressive but can't imagine using it
• I wish trying to go up from the first selection would wrap around to the bottom selection. It's too cumbersome to select a choice towards the end of the screen
• downloading books is FAST — couple of seconds for each of the two books I bought
• browsing web pages is like turning CSS off
• User Agent came through as "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Linux 2.6.10) NetFront/3.4 Kindle/1.0 (screen 600x800)"
• I'm already thinking about web applications for it (especially my graded reader ideas and flashcards)
• the immediacy and ease at which you can buy books could be dangerous :-)

I'm very happy so far and can imagine buying the majority of my books for the Kindle from now on. The real test will be whether I'll go back and re-buy any of my existing books (especially the ones back in storage in Australia)

UPDATE: just discovered the Web browser has an Advanced Mode that does CSS and Javascript. This site doesn't look too great with it, though :-)