I've had the Kindle for several months now, time to write a bit about my practical experience with it. First of all I have to say that I do not regret having it, overall the Kindle proved to be excellent at what it is doing. The only caveat is that what it is doing is far more limited than for example an iPad or notebook computer.

As I was born in the sixties, and didn't have video games in my youth, I spent much of that youth in public libraries. I'm a fast reader, and I read a lot, so public libraries were ideal for keeping me entertained. Now I don't know how public libraries work where you live, but in my experience they were full of books that were over 10 years old, while getting the latest bestseller was next to impossible, because the library had bought at best one of them and somebody else was always reading it. The Kindle is such a public library in reverse: You can have all the latest bestseller, and all very old books without copyright, but finding a book that is over 10 years old is hard. For example I was interested in re-reading the Dalziel and Pascoe detective novels of Reginald Hill, and on the Kindle most weren't available, or only as audio books (and I prefer reading myself to listening to somebody else reading a book). But if I read a review of a new book somewhere, chances to find it available for the Kindle are good. And I could get a lot of classics for free, even directly from Amazon.

These days I mostly read books while traveling, for holiday or business. For that the Kindle proved to be very suitable. Except for starting and landing, where the flight attendant will tell you to switch off all electronic devices, the Kindle makes for good reading material during a flight. Especially during long flights with no internet connection on the plane the Kindle is better than a tablet computer, as it has a much longer battery life. If traveling to a sunny place, the Kindle shines with another feature: e-Ink with no back-light makes reading on the Kindle possible even in bright sunlight, while you need shadows for back-lit LCD devices. Packing a Kindle also means not packing a stack of books, which makes your luggage lighter. And again the long battery life provides reading all day long without worrying about where the next power socket is.

As a replacement for a tablet computer, the Kindle only has limited usefulness. I don't have the new "Kindle Touch", so using arrow keys and enter for surfing is less than ideal. I have a 3G model, and free 3G is obviously good, but it only works for Amazon and Wikipedia. For anything else I need a WiFi connection. And if I have that, I found that I preferred my iPod to the Kindle for surfing.

So my overall impression is that the Kindle is excellent as an e-book, as a replacement for regular books. The Kindle is not really a good competitor for tablet computers. But then the Kindle only costs a fraction of an iPad, so that is okay. As long as you don't expect much more than an electronic device for reading books, I can only recommend the Kindle.