Birthday Kindle

My parents bought me an Amazon Kindle for my birthday.
I  have been keen on getting one for a while - I tend to reread books so having books which I've already read with me isn't a problem. Plus the sci fi geek issue comes forward - these devices are very similar to Star Trek's Padds. The Kindle even has built in wireless for automatic delivery of content. i can order books from Amazon and they are on the machine when I get home.

Of course, the big issue is the usability. As someone who regularly spends 50 hours a week working in front of a monitor and then goodness knows how much personal time, I know something about eye strain. Similarly, as some one who has written more than my share of technical documentation for the "paperless office" I know that it is difficult to replace the ease of printed material.
 after using this for a few days I have to say I am very impressed. Since it uses e-paper there is no back light. The screen is an off white with dark text, the same as any paperback you might have. It is the back lighting which causes most of the eye strain so that problem is more or less resolved. The other failure for the paperless office is portability. The kindle is wirelessly enabled through email. You can send documents to the machine simply by emailing them to its unique email address (or use the USB cable...). If you email them you also get the option of having them converted to Kindle's internal format (I've tried with pdf's and I wasn't impressed, but they are heavily formatted) although the Kindle will support most office formats.

Reading on the device is actually quite easy. There is no real glare off the screen. The unit is also light enough to hold with one hand, with pagination buttons on both sides to cater for those lefties still out there. Battery life is supposed to be good - 4 weeks with wireless turned off - and the default setting is to go into sleep mode (with an image screen saver coming on) rather than being turned off. Sleep mode will also kick in if you haven't turned a page for a set number of minutes.
Organising books is a bit basic - they all appear in a simple contents list. You can add categories, and then display categories which can simplfy the display list. Sadly, you cannot nest categories, but books can be memeners of more than one category.
The last issue with paperless office is note taking. The Kindle has a keypad for making notes and the 1984 stories all show that people do use the notes tool, but i haven't tried that yet, as I'm still  only using it for leisure.
Certainly, after a week I'm well impressed.