David Pogue's Home for the Holidays
This is his Holidays 2010 listing of recommended tech-related gifts "perfect" for each room in the house.
Heading the list is ye olde
For each item recommended, Pogue has the usual whimsical VIDEO :-)
The simple description for the 'living room' Kindle is merely
"There are many e-book readers on the market, but Amazon's Kindle ($139 and up) is far superior to its competitors."
While at this page, I was struck that it included two of my recent buys, both unusual. Since I have recent positive experience with these, I'll include these in case some readers are interested.
The one that's now always with me is the
The pocketable Canon S95 which is fully automatic if you want and yet gives full manual control and is just terrific in low-light situations. It's my favorite camera, ever (including my Digital Rebel), but it has only the screen-image (high resolution and contrast) and no viewfinder.For anyone else seriously looking into a really excellent low-light pocketable camera (no flash needed, my preference) with amazing image stabilization, here are reviews to browse: Trusted Reviews (thorough), Burrard-Lucas blog (fun read), and Pogues' own florid piece
Also, the LG BD590 WiFi Blu-Ray player with a 250G hard disk. It allows you to play youtube, netflix, etc on it.
TIP: UNUSUAL BATTERY DRAIN WHEN THE KINDLE IS NEW
I replied to a public question on Facebook recently, and the suggestions in my post did help the person who had been having fast draining of her battery despite the Kindle being new and not doing that much reading on it. Here, in case it might help others (as this problem does come up on the forums) is the conversation in the Kindle forum there:
' Q: I have been reading everywhere about people getting up to a month out of a single battery charge on their K3. I have my Wi-Fi off & use my Kindle solely for reading for about an hour a day & have had to charge it once a week since I got it in. Sept. Is there any reason why this could be happening? When not in use, I keep my Kindle in a leather case inside my purse, along with my other devices (Cellphone, iTouch, etc.). Can batteries drain off each other when stored together like that? May seem like a stupid question & rather unlikely but I'm really reaching for answers here. Under similar conditions I only had to charge my Sony once every 3 weeks or so. Any help would be just peachy - thanks!
A: J, if you don't expect subscriptions and have wireless on at times, it should last longer if you're reading only an hour a day.
D had a good point re it not holding a fuller charge when it's new but also it's not the kind of battery that you have to discharge, as it has no memory problems, though sometimes at first maybe a few batteries might be confused for all I know.
I collected a group of official Kindle Team or Customer Service advisories put out on the Amazon Kindle forums in announcements -- about best battery maintenance practices, which is at http://bit.ly/kbattery.
There are also a couple of other factors (and one important one is not to leave even your bag with Kindle in a hot closed car for awhile but especially not to leave one in a hot car with windows closed).
When a Kindle is new you tend to download more books to it than at other times. Each book must be 'indexed' to make a list of key words for Search routines of the entire Kindle to find a word or phrase in a book, on the device and also for searches within the book you are reading.
That takes a lot of battery life initially. If you suddenly download a lot of books at anytime, it'll cause a lot of battery activity to do the indexing of each one.
Then there is occasionally a book that for some reason never finishes indexing (maybe something happened during the download). You can find that type [of problem] by doing a kindle search for a [nonsense] word at the home screen.
At the Home screen, type any nonsense word such as 'xyyx' which will not be found in your everyday book, and press the Enter key or the 5-way button (to click it, as it will search your items on the device that way).
While the Kindle is searching every book, it will also tell you if a book (or periodical) has not been 'indexed' yet.
If one book never indexes completely, delete it. If you can't delete it using the Kindle (unlikely), delete it via your computer when you can connect the USB cable to the computer's USB port and see the Kindle files under the "documents" folder of the Kindle drive.
It's not easy to know which book is which, due to the odd titles that Amazon uses, but you can open the book, make a bookmark or a little highlight and then close it.
That will become the "most recent" book accessed and will show at the top when you sort files by latest date. (You can also use the free Kindle for PC or Kindle for Mac apps to check that the most 'recent' book is the one that's not fully indexing.)
But it should be easy to delete anyway from the Kindle. If it's an Amazon book, you can just re-download it. If it's not an Amazon book, you should have it backed up. Maybe re-downloading another copy of it will fix it.
When you DO have wireless On, to download books maybe, a bad connection or reception where you are will cause larger battery use when trying to get a file.
But you've given it a month and it should hold longer. If it continues not to hold more useful charge than that, call Kindle Support [866-321-8851] who will do a log or record keeping with your help and if it doesn't hold a charge long enough, they will likely send a replacement while you keep the old one until you know for sure the 2nd one is okay.
4 days for an hour a day of reading is not how it should be, at any rate. (Also make sure the battery isn't left on accidentally as I tend to do with mine.)
- Andrys
Q: (and issue may be resolved)
I discovered that mine was indeed still indexing books. I did as you said, Andrys, with the search & found it was still indexing & had 200 books to go (BTW, I loaded it with almost 3,000 books I had converted from my Sony prior to this).
So, yeah, it makes sense that it has simply taken it this long to index all those books. I left it plugged in & checked it the next morning & it was down to 5 books to index. When it was finished I unplugged it & have left it alone all day. I'm checking the battery now...& the level is at almost full, just missing the tiny lower right corner on the battery pic. So, we'll see over the next few days if it holds. I mean, it seems logical that that was the problem, so hopefully it's all sorted out now. Thanks SOOOO much 4 your help & I'll post an update later in the week. :)
Q: (Actually, a brief follow-up report)
OK, so, it's been about a week since my last charge & the battery is at just below half full. That's definitely better than before!
Q: final follow-up report seen
T - read Andrys' big post towards the top of this thread. She gives a lot of great & very helpful information that ultimately got my Kindle's battery sorted out. A week and a half on one charge thus far. Try her suggestions & let us know. '
WELL, I left in the nice feedback, mainly to show all that wordiness contained something that did work for her. But the battery drain from initial indexing is not very well known.
Also, many are not aware of the Kindle customer service battery-maintenance advisories.
When the Kindle is new, many download as much as possible, usually from the free areas, or from a collection they already had on another Kindle or from their Calibre Kindle file-management program..
Hope this will help people who find it :-)
Kindle 3's (UK: Kindle 3's), DX Graphite
Check often: Temporarily-free late-listed non-classics or recently published ones
Guide to finding Free Kindle books and Sources. Top 100 free bestsellers.
UK-Only: recently published non-classics, bestsellers, or highest-rated ones
Also, UK customers should see the UK store's Top 100 free bestsellers.
From the press release last night, which mentions in each of the first few paragraphs! the 450,000 books available in the store, probably to point out the iBookstore currently has 60,000 - a figure that's said to includethe 30,000 Project Gutenberg books that are directly downloadable (no cost) to the Kindle but are not counted by Amazon as Kindle users gets those direct from Project Gutenberg. 
Rather than move the older reviews-post up, I'm just adding a link to the latest update for reviews, as people are still having a hard time deciding between the promising Nook and the Kindle. 