A few months ago, I got what was then the latest Kindle, and though I had been a little skeptical about reading electronic books (I can be a bit of a curmudgeon), I found that I really liked it. My chief complaint about the device was how hard it was to take notes. Depressing those tiny pill buttons was infuriatingly slow, to the point that I — who have never been in love with the lack of tactile feedback when tapping buttons on the iPhone — resorted to something like text-speak when making notes to make it less painful.

So when the Kindle Touch came out, I pre-ordered excitedly. Here at last would be an inexpensive e-reader I could easily take notes on while also sparing my eyes the strain of staring at a glowing screen.

Although I’ve owned the Touch for several weeks now, I’ve read only one book and a few smaller things on it, and I sort of hate it. The thing is sluggish. Page-turns take forever, and tapping to call forth and use menus takes a day-and-a-half. While I found the interface of my older Kindle pretty intuitive, on this one, I can never remember exactly what I have to do if I want a menu (to add an item to a collection, for example). Sometimes taps are interpreted as drags and vice versa. It’s so very easy to accidentally turn a page with an incidental touch. And it just doesn’t feel as good in my hand as the older Kindle; it’s thicker and heavier, hard to hold comfortably without making the aforementioned incidental contact. The typing interface is fairly usable (certainly better than hardware buttons), but I’m not at all convinced that the typing fix is worth the many other inconveniences. And to top all that off, the Touch has spontaneously rebooted a couple of times in the last couple of days, losing my place in the book I was reading.

I’m thinking very seriously about seeing if I can send the Touch back in, either to trade for the newest line of the regular Kindle or for cash back.