TL;DR: It's awesome and I love it!

Amazon had been making fun of me. For a while they sent me promotional emails about the new Kindle Paperwhite. They would let me add it to the shopping cart just to end up telling me that unfortunely some items can't be sent to the shipping address. They knew where I live, so why bother trying to sell me something that they say they can't?

I had waited for the Paperwhite for quite a while. Not because of the back-light, because that actually goes against what I expect the kindle to be: a device that's pretty much book-like. I wanted Paperwhite because I wanted a touch interface instead of bulky keyboards.

The bad

The thing I like the least about the device is that it doesn't allow for the backlight to be completely turned off. There's always a residual light that, at least for me, is always noticeable. The e-ink display technology is awesome because it makes use of environment light. Forcing me to have the backlight always on just doesn't make sense. It also gives a blueish glow to the pages. Fortunately at least this isn't as much of a battery drain as I'd expect: even with the light always on, a single battery charge seems to last forever!

The meh

I've seen people praising the newly added fonts. I've seen people complaining about them not being the best fonts in the world. I didn't even care about changing the font. Did you ever wanted to buy a book but didn't because the font wasn't Scala for serif and Myriad Pro for sans-serif? Of course this is a poor argument: it could still be applied if the device only supported fixed-width fonts. But then, if a book was written in a fixed width font, that could've prevented me from buying it. Well, these fonts don't hurt and are readable enough not to make me care.

Whenever the contents of the screen change, it is possible that remains of the previous contents remain visible on the e-ink displays. A way to get around this is to make the software controlling the screen to do a full refresh (setting the screen all black and all white and then finally printing the new content). Would I make a big deal out of this? No. In almost every book I can see visual evidence of whatever's written in the back of the page that I'm currently reading, so this misbehavior makes the device seem even more book-like to me!

The awesome

Best feature ever: Time until end of chapter. I simply can not overstate how awesome this little estimate is. Until now the estimates were never completely off, and this helps tremendously with scheduling the reading (or the sleeping or whatever else comes next to reading in your agenda).

The Read Later that really works

If you own a Kindle then you know you can email mostly any document to Amazon, to get it delivered on your device. If you use Instapaper and go on browsing the web and marking stuff to read later, you can tell Instapaper to send a bundle of those unread articles to your Kindle. This workflow can be a real productivity booster because it allows you to read the long insightful articles when you have thought time for them, or speed reading (because e-ink displays are awesome for that) the less insightful stuff.

Veredict

Ever since I got myself the Kindle Paperwhite that I've been not only reading more but actually organizing my browsing habits differently, and I really feel more productive with it. Even though 60 days have passed, I'm totally confident that this device will keep bringing me value for quite some time.