I don’t have pics. I’ll post them up later tonight.

Packaging is great. I like the whole “Once Upon A Time…” opening strips on both the Kindle and the cover accessory. The rest of the packaging has a nice mixture of cool and environmentally-friendly.

Mind explosion #1: I open the Kindle, and I see a nice diagram about what I should do first on the sticker covering the face of the Kindle. Of course, I remove this sticker after I plug it into the wall, and those same directions are there. I did a double take. Ah ha, I figured out. It’s this awesome e-ink business. Oh, you trixy Kindle.

Another cool thing is that whenever you turn off the Kindle, it defaults to a portrait of the writer. Last time it was Poe. This time, it was Twain. I wonder how many of these portraits exist.

The new cover design. I hear the first gen Kindle’s kept falling out of their covers (which was included back then… not so anymore. These revisions are a bit better, although it seems like one more latch of the right side of the Kindle would have been nice. The Kindle is only attached at the binding, which might cause the two tiny little slits on the Kindle to break if opened improperly. You’ll see what I mean when I post some pics.

The size. Much smaller than I thought… then again, I’ve never seen these in real life. Not a good or a bad thing, just a thing

One HUGE disappointment: responsiveness of the UI. The page turning is fine. It’s a tiny tiny bit slower than what I’m used to, going from page to page on a normal book… but when you start messing with that 5-way button, the lag is ridiculous. I feel like this is a firmware issue, and not a limitation of the device… but it does bother me a little bit. However, it’s not missing my clicks, so I can just hit it 5 separate times to have the cursor go down 5 lines… it just takes a little bit of time for the Kindle to catch up.

Yeah, I know. No pics, or it didn’t happen. Blah.