The Kindle is almost the size of a small netbook, pretty big to carry around when all you can do with it is read books. I tried a Kindle, and am going to stick with using a smartphone as it's easy to carry everywhere without additional hassle. A dedicated reader would be useful for pdf documents which you can't read easily on mobile devices, but the screen of the standard Kindle is too small for reading many types of pdf comfortably.<p>Pluses for the Kindle are massive battery life and good readability in bright sunshine.