To celebrate our wedding anniversary, I gave Melody a Kindle with a nice red cover. We affectionately call her Hippolyta.
She’s lovely. The screen is good and refreshes briskly. It’s funny how, these days the most natural thing is try to touch the screen instead of the keyboard. The up-down-left-right-enter keys work well as do the two next (>) and previous (<) page buttons (a pair on either side previous above next). The Del key is inconveniently placed next to the return key. You will mistakenly press it. The Menu, Back, and Home buttons — all have useful functions. Using the Kindle is a pleasure. Dictionary lookup is easy. The “screensaver” pictures are pretty (good thing since you can’t change them). The overall user experience is top notch as magical as other devices with a less flashy, more sophisticated appeal. She looks very steampunk in her case.
As hoped for, synchronization of Amazon bought books (but not your own stuff) happens automatically between devices. I can read to Melody while standing on the bus from Sonic (my iPod touch) then switch to Hippolyta when seated and wireless allows. Watch out for periodicals: they only work on the Kindle hardware, not on iOS, Windows, or Mac.
When we plug-in Hippolyta for USB recharging, she mounts as a disk. We can also send documents to a @kindle.com address. Hopefully Melody will be able to carry fewer PDF printouts. Though Hippolyta can render PDFs, they’re hard to view without zooming. Though there seem to be lots of tools, we haven’t found a way that will work for us yet. For HTML on the other hand, the Send to Kindle Chrome Extension works great.