Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Kindle, Meet Kindle

I purchased the Kindle Keyboard two years ago and really enjoy it. It was easy to use right out of the box. However, it does act up on occasion. So for our anniversary last month, my husband pre-ordered the new Kindle Paperwhite for me. It finally arrived today. You can see the two Kindles charging side-by-side in the picture. The old model is on the right, and the new one on the left. Here are my initial impressions:

1. It wasn't hard to set up. I had de-register it (since my husband didn't specify it was a gift), re-register it to my account, and enable it for our home's WiFi. Once I remembered the correct password, I had no problem.

2. I have a lot of samples and sideloaded items (from Smashwords and Kickstarter) that aren't part of the official library on Amazon. In order to transfer them to my new Kindle, I wound up copying the contents of my old Kindle to my laptop and then pasting them onto the new Kindle. So far, it seems to have worked.

3. I don't mind the ads at the bottom of the screen; in fact, I used one to save on a cover for the new Kindle. However, I'm not interested in seeing part of the Amazon store on my Kindle. Since it only shows up when the covers are displayed, I just switched to the list view.

4. The toughest part so far was figuring out how to organize individual items. I was able to import my collection folders after transferring over my books, but not all of my books were sorted properly. To make matters worse, I couldn't figure out how to select a book and put it into a collection. On the Kindle Keyboard, you can select a book by pressing right on the five-way controller. Here, there's no such thing. Every time I touched the book title, the book opened for reading instead of giving me a way to work with it. The official FAQ from Amazon didn't address this problem. I finally found the solution on the Kindle Help Forum; you can bring up the menu options for individual books by "long-touching" the title. It's a little trickier than what I'm used to, but at least it works. I was obsessing about this so much I couldn't read anything on my new Kindle!

I need a couple more weeks of playing around with it before I deliver my final verdict. So, has anyone else bought one of the new Kindles? If so, what do you think of it?


3 comments:

PT Dilloway said...

I bought a Kindle Touch last year and it's help up pretty well so far, so I don't feel the need to buy another one. Besides they'll have an even better one out next year, right?

Sandra Ulbrich Almazan said...

Probably, PT.

The Kindle Keyboard is two years old. It still works fine most of the time, but sometimes it does get a bit wonky.

Cindy said...

I was surprised that they came out with a white background as I thought that would be harder on the eyes. I'm interested to see how you like that part of it.

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