I'm a gadget addict, I'll admit it.  I received my Amazon Kindle today, and took some obligatory photos.

First impressions…

The screen is easy to read, and the Kindle User's Guide was easily navigable and clear.  Web content in basic mode renders nicely, especially Wikipedia articles.  Sprint's EVDO connection is snappy, but that might due to only HTML being downloaded.  The unit is nice and slim, reminding me of a PADD.  It also fits nicely in my inner jacket pocket.

The PDF conversion is fairly weak.  I e-mailed the JNCIS Study Guide to my Kindle account to test it out.  Unfortunately, there seems to be no way of jumping to a specific page, except for clicking on links embedded in the PDF.  Hitting the back button isn't always predictable, either.

The interface is horribly laggy, and typing reminds me of SSH over a GPRS connection.  It might have something to do with prerendering for the E Ink display, but I doubt it.  Not a big deal, though, since the unit isn't made for composing large pieces of text.

For those of you are wondering, this is what I saw in my access log from the Kindle:

207.171.167.25 - - [11/Feb/2008:18:52:55 -0500] \
"GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 855 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 4.0) NetFront/3.3"

And some DNS resolution:

25.167.171.207.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer iad-fw-global.amazon.com.

Looks like the Internet connection is fed through Sprint's network directly to Amazon, and egresses out NTT/Verio.

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