On the 28th I purchased it around 1900. Today on the 30th at 0820 it arrived in the airport in Helsinki. Also yesterday somebody called and said it would come this week.
Update: It's now on the way to my work! Got it around 12 or so. Less than 48 hours to get the Kindle (and it came from Reno, NV, US!).
Purchase
I got it from the American amazon.com - where it cost 140$ - totally it came to 240$ (got a black cover without light, shipping and VAT charge as well). Cheapest? Maybe not, but the dollar is pretty weak at the moment.
The amazon.co.uk price is 111£.
Currency converted: 140 USD is worth 96.6 EUR. (1 USD : 0.69 EUR) Currency converted: 111 GBP is worth 123.21 EUR. (1 GBP : 1.11 EUR)
So I'm pretty confident that those 30€ is worth it, it still wouldn't be free shipping it from the UK page. But it's on the way!
Thoughts
Have been looking forward to this a while now, but after I tried reading a little on a friend's Kindle (larger screen) I just had to go for it. I went with the smaller screen because I don't want to carry something in magazine size. Pocket size now that's more like it.
But I wonder if I will miss reading large ass 1000 pages books like 'Dust of Dreams' or 'Game of Thrones'? What I won't miss is carrying that book around though maybe it does make my arms a little stronger? =) First book I'm going to try is 'The Crippled God' by Steven Erikson.
Unwrapping & First sight
It comes in nice no-tape boxes (well the larger package does but not the smaller ones inside). Environmentally friendly - I like. I never held one of this size in my hand before - but it feels pretty good. Not heavy at all (in comparison to my normal books), not too light either.
It's a little uncomfortable to write things on it (tried to set up wireless access). So I'll have to do that when I come home and are sure of the passwords/logins :) Set the wireless up when I was at home, worked great. No problem at all. I think the writing on it just takes a little bit to get used to. It's not buttons like on a keyboard, it's more like round thin buttons.
Eject on Linux
If you run linux on your PC - you cannot start using it from scratch. It will tell you that you need to eject the Kindle before - and it's not charging. The command you type is:
eject /dev/sdb1
/dev/sdb1 can vary. I just hit 'dmesg' and saw that there was a 3GiB device connected on [sdb]. Be careful not to eject your other disks :) You may have to have root access to do this, if so, try: sudo eject /dev/sdb1
In the end of 'dmesg' you should see this after you connect the kindle:
scsi 5:0:0:0: Direct-Access **Kindle** Internal Storage 0100 PQ: 0 ANSI: 2 sd 5:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0 sd 5:0:0:0: [**sdb**] Attached SCSI removable disk sd 5:0:0:0: [**sdb**] 6410688 512-byte logical blocks: (3.28 GB/3.05 GiB) sd 5:0:0:0: [**sdb**] Assuming drive cache: write through sd 5:0:0:0: [**sdb**] Assuming drive cache: write through
This was on my RHEL 6 - Red Hat workstation. The syntax is the same for Ubuntu so it sounds more like a Linux thing than a distribution specific thing. Of course you might also be able to do it graphically - depending on your window manager.
Reading
Also did some reading with it in the sofa and in the bed and it's just perfect. Thinking that maybe when I'm at home I don't need the cover - which would make it less heavy - which is good when lying down.