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Having used my new Kindle 2 for a few weeks now, I adore it more than ever and still feel it’s a significant improvement over my beloved Kindle 1. But, nothing is perfect, and there are still improvements I’d love to see with the Kindle. Some of these were suggestions I made earlier when I was using my Kindle 1:

• The Slide Switch. The slide switch on the top edge of the Kindle 2 is too hard to see or feel without holding the device at an awkward angle. And, it’s often hard to know if you have partially versus completely moved the switch. Sometimes I wait for the device to wake up thinking I have moved the switch completely when I haven’t. Making the switch easier to see/feel and giving an immediate visual or tactile confirmation that the switch has been moved completely would be great.
• The Home Button. Jeff Rock made a good point about the Home button that I hadn’t considered on my Kindle 1 or Kindle 2. It really doesn’t need to be where it is and another Previous Page button would be much more useful in its place. The Home button should go lower.
• Distractions. Having a logo on the front of the device and having always-on displays for things like document progress, battery level, and wireless signal level can be distracting for readers. They haven’t bothered me, but I know they have bothered Jeff and others. Marco suggested to me that Amazon should simply have a button or key that would show and hide all the display indicators. Sounds like a good idea to me.
• Scheduled downloads. I subscribe to Newsweek and Atlantic Monthly on the Kindle and get a fair number of book samples and books. I have to turn on the wireless connection, waiting for any download(s) that are ready, and then remember to turn off the wireless connection so my battery doesn’t drain. Why not let us tell our Kindle to turn on wireless and check for downloads on a daily or weekly schedule?
• More periodicals. We need more newspapers and magazines on the Kindle. The Kindle Store still has nearly the same list of periodicals now as when it opened and year and a half ago. Why isn’t the selection growing faster? If publications already have their content in digital form for the web, getting them to sell it on the Kindle shouldn’t be that hard. For example, I would think the Foreign Affairs crowd is affluent, travels a lot, and thinks about the environmental impact of printing and shipping. Why not get Foreign Affairs, which is just about all text anyway, on the Kindle?
• Make buying books from samples seamless. When I’m done reading a sample, I have to note my place in the text, buy the full book from the link at the end of the sample, delete the sample, open the full book, and find my place again. Ugh. When I buy the full book from the link at the end of the sample, the sample should just expand to become the full book and I should be able to keep right on reading from where I am. (Also, make the progress bar of a sample based on the length of the full book rather than the length of the sample so a reader knows what they’re in for if they buy the full book.)
• Let us file/categorize things. I want to be able to browse my Kindle content by read/unread, fiction/non-fiction, sample/full-book, genre, my favorites, etc. Make it easy to create folders, tags, or labels to support organization.

Overall, I continue to be impressed my what Amazon has done with Kindle and look forward to future improvements to the product.