I don't know what the non-paperwhite ones are like, but the paperwhite screen quickly looks like a real mess if you have it set to refresh irregularly.
The paperwhite screen is nice, but whoever signed off on the paperwhite's touch UI exhibited some poor judgement. The onscreen keyboard is fine; the page turning is merely adequate; the book list and web browser scrolling is terrible. (The scrolling uses touch-and-drag, but the software doesn't actually scroll the screen until you release your finger, which makes it very hard to judge what's going on. Touching and dragging requires low latency and a high refresh rate, making it a very bad choice for an e-ink screen.)
A few physical inputs would make this device twice as good. Two buttons and a dpad would do it...
I will say I was very impressed with the on-screen keyboard. I could just hammer the little keys as fast as I could type a word, and while the screen couldn't update fast enough it didn't lose keystrokes.
It's sad that that's impressive, but that's where embedded software is today.
The paperwhite screen is nice, but whoever signed off on the paperwhite's touch UI exhibited some poor judgement. The onscreen keyboard is fine; the page turning is merely adequate; the book list and web browser scrolling is terrible. (The scrolling uses touch-and-drag, but the software doesn't actually scroll the screen until you release your finger, which makes it very hard to judge what's going on. Touching and dragging requires low latency and a high refresh rate, making it a very bad choice for an e-ink screen.)
A few physical inputs would make this device twice as good. Two buttons and a dpad would do it...