I purchased a nice new Kindle Paperwhite from Amazon on March 15th, 2019 – about 18 months ago. It wasn’t cheap, it was their top-of-the-line 10th-generation model with free 4G LTE wireless and WiFi and 32GB of storage for books. Today it is an expensive paperweight.

I went to turn it on yesterday and was greeted with a giant battery icon in the middle of the screen with an exclamation mark in it. I’ve seen this a couple times before, and it means the battery is dead. On the previous two occasions I was able to plug it in and after a while it booted up normally and I was up and running again. This time, however, the amber “charging” light never came on at all. I couldn’t tell if it was charging or not. There are no other controls on the device except a single power/standby button.

Everything I found online didn’t help–hold the power button down for 40 seconds to force a hard reset, charge it some more, then try again. Over and over and over. Done, done, and done. It has to be either as serious device issue or a dead battery. It had a 1-year warranty, so that expired months ago (figures). I could pay about $60 for a battery kit that includes both the battery and a special tool to open the device so I can change the battery, but it might not even be the battery. If it turns out the device itself has the issue, I’m out another $60. I can’t buy the battery kit from Amazon, or some stupid reason, so I’m not sure it would be returnable. Batteries are in that gray area when it comes to returns and shipping.

I suppose I’ll eventually just order the battery and get the process going. Right now I’m just too pissed off to bother. I didn’t even use the device much – maybe two dozen times at most, often playing an audiobook on my phone and following along with the kindle book. I can’t see the battery going bad after such limited use and only after 18 months. It just makes me angry that I opted for all of the extras and paid all that extra money and didn’t even use or need those extras.

I don’t think I’ll ever bother with a separate Kindle device again in the future. For me, it’s just not worth it. I can do it all on my phone anyway. I just thought it would be nice to be able to sit outside in the sunlight and still be able to comfortably be able to read my books. I can do that on my phone though, I just have to crank up the brightness to the top and turn off the auto-brightness option to make it bright enough to read in most sunlight conditions. And my phone’s screen is a little smaller, that’s all.

So here it sits, just another scrap device that’s going to be the new base of my recently-flushed “broken hardware pile.” Oh joy.