Top 5 Easy to fix software problems with the New Amazon Kindle (Kindle4)

1. Large Screen Menus - It's maddening that Amazon won't make a Kindle that my Grandma can use.  She can read the book just fine, but she can't choose other books from the menu and there's no way she could use the Kindle store to buy a book.  My Grandma reads large print books.  Why can't she read a Kindle with Large Print Menus?  In the Settings screen there should be a large print/accessable mode that would use simple large menus with the reading font set to a large font.  It makes no sense why Amazon won't do this.

2. Highlight button confusion - On the old Kindle, I could click to start hilight, select the area, click to end hilight.  It was great.  On the new Kindle, they've made it harder to hilight.  You click the button, it then asks you if you want to "Start Highlight" or "Full Definition" or want to "Create a Note".  Hold on a second here. I don't have a keyboard.  Why flash this create a note button in my face everytime I want to create a highlight?  Why not move Create a Note to the menu and just create a note on that page.  If the user clicks on an already created highlight, it could bring up the share box.  And the Full Definition option already comes up when you hover over a word and it defines it for you.  Sepereate the three functions and restore my highlight key.  Don't make me return to the old heavy kindle because you screwed up the software.

3. Popular Highlights, Public Notes, Annotations Backup came defaulted to OFF and the screen never popped up a message about what they are and how they work.  Maybe before you read a book, it should bring up a "Kindle tips box" that would help people get more information out of their kindles (although that could be annoying, but it could be turned off as well).  This really goes to the whole, is the Kindle a social reader or not question.  Currently it's not, especially if you have to go into the settings menu and turn it on.

4. Turn Wifi Off was just moved into Airplane mode, but I'm fine with that, with the exception of the fact that I used to run my old kindle with wifi off all the time to save the power.  Not sure if my new kindle has a problem with that, but I'll test it out.

5. Just get rid of the progress bar at the bottom of the screen.  I don't need to be reminded that I'm 71% of the way through constantly.  Especially when I'm reading Game of Thrones and they've combined all four books into one massive ebook and it's gonna take thousands of page presses to even get the thing to move from 1%.  It's better appearing when you push menu.  They don't have clocks in casinos and they shouldn't have digital progress meters on books.

Some of these are minor complaints, but the first two are pretty serious and I think pretty darn easy to fix.  I might check back in with more pictures and more complaints, but for now I'm going to go back to reading my book, which is what I was doing, before the Highlight key made me throw up my arms in rage and type out these blog posts.