The first thing that struck me with the Kindle was its display. The welcome text was, as many other people have also mentioned, not on the transparent sheet covering the display, it was the display! Outstanding, and very paper-like (which means that you need some light to read the Kindle in).
Buying books from Amazon is easy and over the air as expected. What's a tad difficult is finding free, contemporary ebooks ;-) Project Gutenberg and its various off-shoots are nice, but they don't quite cut it if you're looking for Freakonomics or Blink! or ... catch my point?
Kindle plays nice with many popular formats, but sadly, that doesn't include PDFs. I'm told that PDF handling has improved significantly since the first generation of Kindles, but there's certainly a long way to go before it gets as easy and natural to read PDFs on the Kindle as it is to read MOBI or HTML files. Fortunately, thanks to a heads-up from a friend, I now use the free ebook library management program Calibre which helps me overcome difficulties with Kindle-unfriendly formats. Calibre converts ebooks into a great variety of formats specific to your favourite ebook reader. I'm happy now!
Transferring books to your Kindle is as easy as copying stuff over the supplied USB cable. If you prefer Wifi, then all you'll need to do is send the ebooks over to your Kindle's email address and the Kindle will download them when you're connected to a Wifi network. Alternatively, if you're flush with money and don't know how to spend it, you could give it away, £0.10 at a time per MB, to Amazon's Whispernet service which will deliver it over their excellent 3G network.
A feature that I find very handy is the built in dictionary. Using it is quite intuitive: you move the cursor over to the desired word, and a small hint / tool-tip pops up at the top or bottom with the meaning of the word. If you'd like to read the full entry, just press the 'Return' key on the keypad.
No review of the Kindle can be complete without the superb feature called synchronisation. In one stroke, Amazon ensures that you can read your ebooks - from wherever you last left them - on any supported device, and even on your PC. How? Use the Kindle application for your favourite device. There's a catch however: it seems as if books that you transfer through USB don't get synchronised (well, they didn't get synchronised on my Android). I'll update this post later if I'm proved wrong.
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