Bought a Kindle a few weeks ago¹.

In a nutshell, I’m pretty happy with the Kindle. I don’t think it replaces using my other ebook enabled devices, such as my iPhone or iPad, but it’s a good way to read ebooks. If you’ve been waiting for a device to make the leap to ebook, I’d say the new generation of Kindles and other current generation e-ink devices are good enough to make that leap. If you already use a smartphone or tablet and are satisfied with reading ebooks on those devices, there’s no necessity of getting a Kindle or similar device, but you may enjoy using it as much or more.

I’m pretty impressed with the Kindle as a whole. The refresh rate on the e-ink screen is fast enough to be tolerable, which I had qualms about on prior generations. The clarity is more than acceptable, and it works pretty well at the essential task of presenting text to be read. Amazon’s Kindle bookstore is also one of the best available and purchasing an ebook directly from the device or from something else and sending it to the device is easy to do.

The flaws of the Kindle are how awkward it is to navigate a list of hundreds of ebooks, and how slow the onscreen keyboard can be. The navigation isn’t slow per se, but it is slow compared to using iBooks or some other app on a tablet or smartphone where you can just scroll through the list quickly. iBooks also allows you to filter the list of ebooks by searching metadata; the Kindle, on the other hand, searches the full text which makes searching through the list of ebooks difficult if you just want to see a certain author or a certain series of works, leaving aside the onscreen keyboard’s comparable awkwardness of use.

To sum up, it’s a nice device, and you can do much worse.