I’ve gone through my share of kindles at this point. Some damage was my fault. I would carry them around everywhere. Early to an appointment, pull it out and read. Someone else running late, pull it out and read. On the train, on the plane, but I didn’t eat it with green eggs nor ham.

Twice, the damage wasn’t my fault. The last time I was trying to be discrete and placed my relatively new 2nd gen paperwhite under a towel poolside. It seems someone mistook my chair for theirs and yes, sat on my kindle. They must have noticed something and they took off. This I was told by others sitting near me. The person didn’t come clean.

Today I received the new 300 dpi paperwhite as I’ve grown tired reading on my ipad mini, primarily because of outdoor reading. I was hoping to leave a review on amazon’s site, but it seems no one can right now. Perhaps because they want to sell them without people saying anything negative. Oops. Guess that was a spoiler.

It’s small. It’s pretty. The back light is nice. I guess the letters are nice and sharp but I’ve always thought they were sharp to begin with. I do miss physical buttons to turn the pages with. The three big problems I have with this one are 1. I already had to do a hard reset to get the swiping to work, 2. The menus seem slow. I think this is the slowest kindle I’ve had so far or maybe because it is more complex. I don’t know. And 3. Quality control. It seems like there is dirt/dust/something under the top layer that reflects the light in a few places. Kinda looks like a pixel on the monitor that’s bright white. Small but intermittently annoying and over time I imagine it will be one of those things you notice more and more.

My first reaction was to be upset that after trying for months to read on my ipad I finally decide to drop a large sum on the paperwhite and it has all these flaws.

It’s not even a day old in my hands right now. I’m going to give it time tonight actually reading instead of downloading all my books again (just once I’d love to see a ‘download all’ option, that also applies to you zinio). I’ve also taken it out for the first time from the plastic sleeve it came in so I can charge it up. All that downloading on wifi chewed up the battery. For reference, while I have not bought digital versions of the majority of my paperbacks, the digital books I have show 86 pages in the cloud and 92 on the device. I also wish I knew of a faster way to scroll through the books. As someone that rereads books, shocking for many people I’ve learned, I don’t delete them when I’m done reading. And searching doesn’t work so well since I don’t always remember the name of the book nor the author since I can be working through 2-4 books at one time. I tried the one book at a time thing but it didn’t last very long. Keyword searching can work if it is are unique.

I hope to wake up refreshed and loving it just so I don’t have to return it and order a new one. Then I’ll have to download the books again, something that will start off with a negative mindset.

-SFA