Kindle Tales

I recently bought a Kindle from Amazon.com. I bought a Kindle 3G, one cover with light and a charger. It cost me around $376 thanks to the hefty $100+ I had to pay for shipping and import duties. (It comes from US so need to pay all sort of import duties). I am still getting flak for this. Instead of asking someone coming from US to carry it for me I chose to ship it. Actually that option never crossed my mind, I was in the euphoria of getting a Kindle that I didn't think much of the logistics. Only after someone mentioned this it ever crossed my mind.

Buying the cover was brilliant. No longer I have to be bored when commuting between Bangalore and home after the bus operator turns off lights.(Well that's actually the only use case I had so far. You cannot read on Kindle without a light source, its same as reading a book). But the charger I am not so sure, never used so far.(But you never know when it will come handy). Its because I always have my laptop with me and I just use the USB charger which came with Kindle.

Delivery took 4 days. They sent it via DHL and it was tracable in transit. They delivered it to my office on April 7th. Thanks to my friends Jai and Tarun a video of unboxing it was shot.

The Kindle itself is very light. But the cover is some 3 times heavier than Kindle itself but its sturdy, looks elegant, and can protect the Kindle in case I drop it.(of course if Kindle is inside it). The power for the cover light is taken from Kindle itself through two points on the left side. Kindle is fixed to the cover via these same points.

The reading experience on Kindle is pure joy. The experience is close to reading a book thanks to the e-ink technology used for display. Also no longer I have to shuttle between a book and my laptop to lookup meaning of an unfamiliar word.(yes, my vocabulary is pretty bad.) Kindle has inbuilt dictionary, just highlight the word using the 5-way controller button and a nice popup shows the word meaning on top or bottom depending on where you are on the current page. Text speech is also nice. When commuting you can just turn it ON and listen to the book rather than read - though I don't use it much.

I bought the 3G version which has free life time 3G internet connection from Amazon. We don't have to worry about from which service provider Amazon is doing this. Its totally transparent to us. Though here in India quite often 3G degrades to EDGE/GPRS. It has a built in web browser branded under experimental features. Browsing in monochrome is not a great experience, but for simple cases like news reading its kind of okay. It also has support for playing mp3 files though I am try to try.

One complaint I have on buying from Amazon Kindle store is that not all books might be available for you country, unless you are in US I guess. So far I encountered 2 such books which I wanted to read. When I queried Amazon they said its because of restrictions from the publishers and they are working on it so that all titles are available in all countries. I think it does not make sense for publishers to restrict e-books based on countries. They are loosing out potential customers(like me) because of this.