The latest Kindle Paperwhite is pretty good, and I use mine every day, but it's not great yet.
Pros: Battery life, dynamic font sizing, convenience for attaining new books, the 3x3 grid view, and cloud synced notes and highlights are amazing.
Major cons from my experience:
1 - Reading progress time estimates are buggy. In one of my current books, it insists "1 minute left in chapter" for every chapter no matter what page I'm actually on or how far I've read.
2 - Highlighting is very broken. As an avid highlighter, the lag time from initiating a highlight to saving it is almost unbearable. Especially if you mis-highlight by a character or word. It seems to get worse the more highlights you have on a given page — this can make highlighting a few sentences on a page take longer than reading the page itself. Unfortunately I think it's an artifact of the e-ink technology and I'm not sure if it can be overcome today.
3 - I'd like for the battery life indicator to be more clear. Sometimes it says "plugin your Kindle immediately to prevent it shutting off" and then it'll last another hour or two.
4 - Loading non-book content to a Kindle, such as an article from the web is a slow, painful process. It's nowhere near the experience of Instapaper. Yes, I know they have blog subscriptions in the Kindle store, but paying 99¢ per blog for content that's free on the web feels broken.
5 - (Minor) It would be nice to have a collapsible table of contents for every book.
6 - (Minor) The front bezel scratches very, very easily. It happened to mine in the first week and now I notice it every time I read.
Pros: Battery life, dynamic font sizing, convenience for attaining new books, the 3x3 grid view, and cloud synced notes and highlights are amazing.
Major cons from my experience:
1 - Reading progress time estimates are buggy. In one of my current books, it insists "1 minute left in chapter" for every chapter no matter what page I'm actually on or how far I've read.
2 - Highlighting is very broken. As an avid highlighter, the lag time from initiating a highlight to saving it is almost unbearable. Especially if you mis-highlight by a character or word. It seems to get worse the more highlights you have on a given page — this can make highlighting a few sentences on a page take longer than reading the page itself. Unfortunately I think it's an artifact of the e-ink technology and I'm not sure if it can be overcome today.
3 - I'd like for the battery life indicator to be more clear. Sometimes it says "plugin your Kindle immediately to prevent it shutting off" and then it'll last another hour or two.
4 - Loading non-book content to a Kindle, such as an article from the web is a slow, painful process. It's nowhere near the experience of Instapaper. Yes, I know they have blog subscriptions in the Kindle store, but paying 99¢ per blog for content that's free on the web feels broken.
5 - (Minor) It would be nice to have a collapsible table of contents for every book.
6 - (Minor) The front bezel scratches very, very easily. It happened to mine in the first week and now I notice it every time I read.