I have a kindle 3 and it is pretty good. Mine has been left in a porter's car for a day (and returned), fallen off a car roof, and dropped, and still survived. My first one did not survive being sat on, though.
it's ok. It's no apple product. It's not smooth, not very pretty. But it is pretty easy to use. It has some new UIs which are not terrible, and some which are terrible.
It's not very configurable. I'd love to be able to just make some basic changes to the page number system. First off, just not show page numbers at all! But it's impossible. The constant knowledge of how much is left, or how far I've gone is annoying. Just let me turn it off.
Despite having a full keyboard, and even though the screen refresh is pretty fast, it's really hard to jump around in a book. Here's what happens when you push "go to" - an entry screen pops up, but, you have no numbers on the keyboard. So you bring up the extended keyboard with another button. But, your cursor is not on the number area, so you have to move down there. Put in numbers (which are in a row, instead of in a numpad layout), then close this, go down to "go to" and go. Since your guess is usually wrong the first time, you either then have to do it all again, or just page back and forth a ton of times. It's super annoying. The system on my old hanvon N510 was 100x better, and the system in openinkpot is way better, too.
I have a certain ebook. When you open it up, the percentage complete is 1%. One, then two pages down, still 1%. Next page, 2%, next 3%. etc through 7%.
How is that supposed to happen? The first pages are the same size.
What actually happens is that
From the book list if you push "left" and then ok, you have deleted a book! No confirmation screen! WTF! I guess this feature is there for people who don't manage their books through a computer.
If the device is idle for a couple minutes a screensaver comes on. It is one of a collection of historical author's faces, or old diagrams. They're fine, except there is one extremely scary one of emily dickinson.
What's ironic is that on a device like this, a screensaver actually wastes energy - just leaving the text displayed on screen would take less energy than drawing / undrawing the screensaver.
It's a slippery little thing that seems to want to fall off of whatever you put it on. Not shaped like a book at all - I liked my old Hanvon N510's shape a lot more.
Overall it's a cool little thing, cheap, and great for books, but the UI is weird. Screen display is way better than N510, and faster, and better than the old default UI (but not better than openinkpot).