I've had a few days to mess around with the Kindle now and I'm pretty impressed. The network is really fast for downloads; it uses Sprint's 3G network, plus it's downloading text so it downloads a whole book in less than a minute. It has other features available in an Experimental section, including internet access. This works ok for text-heavy websites such as Wikipedia. The format on other websites isn't very good. But that's not why I bought it anyway.
It has the dimensions of a trade paperback, but is less than a half inch thick at the spine. The buttons for turning pages work well. There is a short lag when turning pages - that's caused by the display method. Amazon calls it electronic paper - the display is reflective so that it can be read in sunlight and it doesn't need power to hold the ink in place. Because of this it has very good battery life. One thing that was interesting about the battery instructions is that they say to NOT wait for the battery to run down to charge it and to charge the battery often. This is the opposite of most rechargeable batteries.
There are some very cool features for use when reading. One is the ability to take notes - these are kept in a separate file so if you delete a book from the Kindle, you don't lose the notes. Another cool feature is the built-in dictionary - you just put the click the cursor on the sentence of the word you want to look up and it brings up a list of the words in that sentence you can look up. You can also "clip" whole pages and save them in a separate file. This would be really neat for reference material.
It comes with around 200 mb of internal memory, which is supposed to be able to hold between 100 and 200 books. You can also add a normal SD memory card. I picked up a 2 GB card this morning, plugged it into the back and it worked seamlessly. I transferred a few books over just to test it out. It worked great and reading off the SD card was just as fast as the Kindle memory.
If you've checked out the Kindle on the Amazon website you know that you can also subscribe to newspapers, magazines and blogs. I subscribed to 3 blogs - ESPN Baseball, ESPN Fantasy Sports and Brew Crew Ball. These all update with new content automatically. This feature works very well.
I haven't tried this yet, but you can also e-mail documents to your Kindle e-mail address (they assign you one when you purchase the unit) and Amazon translates it into a format that can be read on the Kindle. I'll try it out and let you know how it works.
Is it cooler than the iPhone? I don't know about that, but it's pretty darn close!
