OK I confess I am a gadget junkie and got the Kindle pretty soon after it was released in the UK.

To set up and go, it couldn't be easier and it linked very quickly with my Amazon account. I also have the same account linked to my phone and laptop so can pretty much read anywhere.

The battery life is excellent and I confidently go on holiday without bringing the charger cable safe in the knowledge it will last a week easily. The connector for the charger was also the same as my previous phone (HTC) which also helped.

Downloading a book can be done either directly from the device itself using the easy to navigate menu screen or from an amazon account. If I'm looking for a specific book then I will do it direct from the Kindle but if just looking for a book I tend to go to the computer as I find browsing easier there. If like me you like to read a bit of a book first before you but then you can download samples and try before you buy. Any books you have purchased will automatically download the next time you go online with your Kindle (for me that means switch it on at home)

The books on the Kindle all appear on one list and so I've set up a directory for those I've downloaded and not read yet. Again a very straightforward menu allows books to be added and removed from this directory with a simple click of a button. I'm not one for reading instruction manuals and there are probably lots of other ways to tidy it up which you may wish to do as I find the main list of all the books you've ever bought quite annoying.

Reading a book is easy with buttons to allow you to move forward or back a page and a really obvious button to change the text size. A godsend if like me you are trying to use the varifocals in bed. You can also bookmark particular places in the book and even share what you've read on facebook at the end. I don't do either of these but my friends do and find it very easy.

So it's great for a fiction book and as a maths teacher I love that percentage completed is a regular discussion point at my book group now.

Where I find it particularly unhelpful is in non fiction books where you may want to jump around pages a fair bit. I recently tried to follow Stephen Fry's book on poetry on it and ended up having to buy the paper copy instead. It was just too difficult to keep track of where I was as I kept jumping back to other parts.

Overall an excellent device but more suited to fiction rather than non fiction books.