Well, my Kindle 3 arrived today and despite feeling like I should check my door locks in case the neighbors saw what the UPS guy brought me, I couldn’t be more pleased. I had hands-on interaction with the K2 in a Target, and I really prefer the new K3 layout. I like the aesthetic of the D-pad better than the more joystick-like K2 5-way controller.

I also really liked the design of the secure packaging the K3 came in; it really seemed smartly designed to eliminate jostling.

My K3 is a Wi-Fi only and I was actually pleasantly surprised with how smoothly it integrated into our home WiFi system. The K3, after start-up, did an automatic scan, found our system, and all I had to do was enter in the password… after that, the K3 did everything!

I had about 57 eBooks either purchased or sampled from my time using K4PC, and the K3 found them all. It automatically downloaded all but 14 of them and the rest of those downloaded individually with no hassles.

I also appreciated I could read and interact with Kindle from the first moment, while it was charging.

The whole experience thus far has been very intuitive, very friendly and very enjoyable. I love the contrast, and the customizability of the interface.

All I can say is that those who are having problems must have received a bad unit, because this K3 I have is a dream… I was told it should take 3 hours to charge initially, but I’ve had it plugged in just under two hours and the light just went from yellow to green, so this K3 is exceeding all my expectations.

This is my first-ever K3 and I can say confidently that barring the unforeseen, I will keep it until at least the K5 generation debuts.

My only complaint so far – and it’s a minor and understandable one – is that when playing games like Shuffled Row and Every Word on Kindle, rather than reading books, the battery seems to drop a whole lot faster. Then again, even those games are bound to take up more battery than is required to simply display text.