I was prepared to love my Kindle 2. I can buy books cheap from Amazon, upload my own content, and read it “as easily in bright sunlight as in my living room.”

Except, um, no.

Here’s how the Kindle 2 screen looks in shade. It’s okay, but I would wish for a much higher contrast between the grey “white” of the screen and the grey “black” of the screen:

Here, though, is how the Kindle 2 looks after being refreshed in bright sunlight:

That is correct: when I refresh my Kindle 2 screen in bright sunlight, the text is entirely illegible.

I called Kindle support, hoping for a fix or a replacement, and their response was, “Yep, that’s the way the e-Ink works. Yes, they’re all like that.” In other words, “deal with it.”

The Kindle 2’s screen is refreshed each time it changes — for example, when you change pages. So if you want to read your Kindle 2 “in bright sunlight” you’ll have to move your Kindle 2 into the shade to move to the next page if you want to have any hope of reading it.

So no, the Kindle 2 can most definitely not “be read as easily in bright sunlight as in your living room.” That Amazon says so is a boldfaced lie. A fraud.

Booooooo.

(Incidentally, here’s how the screen looks when it’s refreshed partly in sunlight and partly in shade.)