“I was super-eager to try Kindle 2, but after a day spent test-driving it, I’ve decided to send it back in favor of my old reliable K1. A few of my disappointments are related to my poor vision, but most are not.
1.In response to users who found Ki’s page-turning buttons too easy to hit accidentally, Kindle has made the new ones annoyingly resistant to a light touch, and the “previous page” one is located in a spot that makes it almost impossible to turn using your right thumb, which was easy on K2.
2. Similarly, the 5-position “joy stick” is also stiff and doesn’t “flow,” like K8’s sliding cursor.
3, Oddly enough, despite the 16 shades of gray recognized by K2 (which do indeed make pictures much clearer), the contrast of printed words on the screen is MUCH less sharp than on K1–what were they thinking?
4. A personal disappointment: on “Basic Web,” K2 has CNN instead of MSNBC news; I thought the latter had stories that are much more serious and actually related to current news. CNN today led with a diet story,,,,
5. As with Ki, they have not solved the page-numbering problem, which is parhaps my only real complaint about K1.
On the plus side, the text-to-speech feature isn’t bad, and there’s no question that books you order download faster than with K1. But I, for one, don’t need them to arrive in less than 60 seconds!
If you have the K1 and have ordered the K2, I would definitely recommend test-driving the new one for at least a day before getting rid of the old one. I’ll be really intersted to hear what y’all have to say.”
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“I absolutely agree. I started another thread on this very point (”K2 screen seems blurry…“). I currently have two K2s and one K1 at home and did a side-by-side test and also asked a friend to pick the one that was “easiest to read.” The K1 won hands down.
Based on the other comments in that thread, there seems to be about a 50/50 split between whether existing K1 owners find their new K2s to have a worse screen than their K1s or whether they find the screens comparable. It’s unclear if the “hard to read” quality of the K2 is a defect or if it’s just the way the new screen is.
I’d encourage anyone who has a K1 and a K2 to pull up the same book/page on both and really carefully evaluate whether the K2’s characters are easier or harder to read than the K1 and post their findings either here or in the other thread.”
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“I agree about the screen. My K1 is much easier on my eyes using Font Size 4. I am having a hard time adjusting to the more “washed out” appearance of the screen on my new K2. Thank God I didn’t sell my K1 on Craigslist. I am going to put it through its paces for a week or so and then make my decision.”
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“I am a K1 and K2 owner. My three biggest complaints about the K2:
- The K2 screen offers noticeably less contrast than K1. The words on the K2 are not as dark, and the screen background is an odd greenish beige as opposed to the light gray background on the K1. The effect is that the text looks quite washed out even in relatively bright lighting conditions. At first, I wondered whether I simply got a defective screen, but the number of complaints on here suggests it’s something with the design of the screen itself.
- There’s no article list for newspapers anymore. Instead of being able to page through the article titles, I have to flip through each article, one by one, to see what’s available. The section list — which replaced the article list function — is useless for newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal. The article list feature for blogs is improved on Kindle 2; I’m not sure why Amazon didn’t simply provide the same improvement to newspapers.
- Old issues of newspaper subscriptions apparently are automatically deleted after 2 weeks. Frankly, I liked having an archive of old issues and then being able to search the text quickly.
Another minor nit: The K2 seems to have some weird issues with text justification. On seemingly almost every screen, one or two lines are not properly justified, which is distracting.
Aside from these complaints, the K2 is nice — better button placement, improved screen responsiveness, the 5-way joystick — but since this is supposed to be a reading device, it is hard to get excited about those improvements when the screen contrast is so much worse. Very disappointed here.”
The five-way rocker is definitely a step up in terms of navigation — it makes getting around page way eaiser by allowing you to skip through individual words, and you can actually navigate simple web pages the way you’re used to.