I have a old (sounding strange to say 3 years to be old) Kindle, Kindle DX model that I gifted to my son as I bought a new Kindle Paperwhite 3G. Kindle DX was registered to my Amazon account, when I tried to deregister I got an error “Your kindle is unable to connect at this time. Please try again later. If the problem persists, please restart your Kindle from the Menu in Settings and try again. OK“. I tried restarting, it didn’t help. Kindle DX has only Cellular (2G/3G) connectivity, so I couldn’t get the device connected to Internet through my House Wi-Fi. I took the device to my office and try from there, it didn’t connect from there. Then I tried factory reset the device, once the device came back to life I couldn’t connect so couldn’t register.

Finally, I wrote to Amazon kindle support. I got an email reply saying that the issue can’t be solved through email and they needed me to call them over phone or live chat. I went to their live chat page. I spent some 25 minutes with the first support person who went through the canned steps of restart, reset, try connecting – nothing helped. He didn’t even know that Kindle DX doesn’t have WiFi connection. Then he transferred me to a Kindle expert! (which makes me wonder whether I was talking to a Kindle novice so far), she tried to get me to do the same steps of restart, reset. I protested and said I was willing to pay for shipping and getting the device physically serviced if necessary. Then she gave me instructions on how to go to 611 page in Kindle – this is a hidden page which gives diagnostic information.

To go to 611 page: On your Kindle, open the 611 page by selecting the Home button first, then press Menu, select Settings, then Hold ALT button down while pressing Y-Q-Q then release.

The above page listed all the device information including IMSI & ICCIDs. Then after few more back and forth steps, she identified the problem to be with the connection (!!!). To fix that she asked me to go to 311 Page.

To go to 311 page: Go to Home, select Menu, select Settings, Hold ALT button down while pressing E-Q-Q, and then release.

Doing the above, it showed a dialog, “Switching Wireless Providers, Your Kindle will lose its connection….” and asked for confirmation. On pressing OK, it showed a list of all available wireless providers (cellular networks). I selected one of the 3G networks and tried to access Kindle shop, it worked. Then I went to the same page and selected “Switch automatically (recommended).

Then I was able to register the device to my son’s amazon account & download his purchased books. Everything worked fine & I thanked the Kindle Expert!

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