Kindle 3 Freezes Or Crashes Randomly, Need a Firmware Update Immediately

Update: Amazon has released early preview of Kindle 3 software updates. See here details.

Yes, it happened to my Kindle 3 as well. In the first 2/3 hours of using Kindle, it crashed couple of times. I couldn’t identify the reasons since I was doing nothing but trying to use menu button to select something on the menu. The other time I turned on the light by pulling the lights from the cover, and pushed it back inside, and Kindle got frozen. Then I checked the Amazon Kindle Discussion Forum, and found this thread: “Confirmed….the Kindle 3 is very buggy“. And found it right, a lot of people are complaining about such problems with Kindle 3. However, it’s not happening to everybody. As a result the discussion sometimes got little hot between those who experienced trouble with Kindle 3, and those who didn’t have any issue with it. It was something like those who were complaining about such troubles with Kindle 3 are Kindle-haters. There are other similar threads of discussion on the forum.

Anyway, I’ve tried to find reasons why such kind freezes and crashes happening in the forum, but couldn’t get any specific answer. Different people say different situations why their Kindles got freezes. Here are some of situations:

• Annotating/highlighting. It works for for awhile and then freezes. Same issue occurs after re-booting and/or recharging.
• Some websites are complex, and Kindle 3 freezes or crashes while loading the page.
• Wikipedia integration. Highlight a word to lookup in Wikipedia and the browser  crash midstream.
• Random crashes on page turns.
• Sometimes it crashes with even PDF files.
• There are some complain that it even crashes with Facebook on the browser.
• Random crashes with dictionary lookup.
• It crashes during downloading books from archieve.
• It crashes while moving books to collections.

It seems there is no identifiable pattern in all crashes. Sometimes, Kindle 3 crashes and restarts itself, some other times you’ve to restart or reset the Kindle. Here is a comment by one Kindle 3 owner on the forum that I agree with:

I’ve had probably 8 freezes/spontaneous restarts since getting my K3 on Friday, including a couple yesterday. Nothing today so far, with a couple of hours of usage. There has been no discernible pattern to it, certainly nothing I could reproduce (I’m a software tester by trade), so I would not attribute too much significance to exactly what was going on when it happened. Kindle OS is multithreaded so it could be some background process (like indexing material that has just been loaded, or some garbage collection kicks in at a critical time) that is pushing things over the edge.

I guess there are some bugs in the firmware that Amazon should fixed quickly since so many people ordered Kindle 3, and are still considering ordering one.

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