Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I've owned the first Kindle since it started shipping over a year ago. Despite it's quirks, I loved it... so when Amazon announced the Kindle 2, I pre-ordered right away. I received my shiny new Kindle 2 this past Friday (2/27/09) and started putting it through it's paces. Functionally, it's a huge step up from the previous Kindle - but when I went to do one of my favorite activities this weekend, lounge around in the backyard reading, I discovered a major problem. When exposed to sunlight, my Kindle 2's screen didn't render properly. It was badly faded, streaked, and blotched like an especially terrible Xerox copy... utterly unreadable. Strangely, if I shaded even a portion of the screen with my hand or a piece of paper, the shaded portion rendered clear as a bell... while the portion exposed to the light remained so faded it was unrecognizable. Update: After contacting Amazon's customer service I was sent a replacement Kindle right away. This one does NOT have the bizarre sensitivity to sunlight that my previous one had and now I couldn't be happier. As a user of the original Kindle, I really do have to stress how much better the user experience is in this device than the previous one. Amazon claim's it's only 20% faster, but it FEELS almost twice as fast - and the menus are much better organized and easier to navigate. Unfortunately Amazon won't let me change the rating of this review, but I'd otherwise officially give it 4 stars. The only thing holding Kindle back from utter perfection (ie: 5 stars) is the lack of native PDF support (still!). Sony recently patched in full native PDF support for their own reader - so we know it IS possible, even if you lose some of the devices inherent scaling technology. But since PDF is a lossy format, that's just the trade off you have to make if you want to read native PDF files. Still, now that there's a competing reader on the market with that (rather important) feature, that's really the only area that Kindle needs to improve in order to catch up. On the other hand, Kindle DOES give you wireless access to Amazon's library anywhere, any time... and that's the clincher. At least for me it is.