It has a little toy inside which is the surpirse...
The Kindle surprise is when Amazon takes the excellent Kindle e-book reader with its great easy to read eInk display and fucks it over into yet another version of the iPad.
But this will be no iPad beater, as it looks to be dumbed down on price and use older versions of the Android OS.
So they'll loose full daylight reading, loose high battery life and loose what differentiates them in the market.
IDIOTS
What makes this worse is I am just about to buy a Kindle 3G because I love the screen so much for reading ebooks. Looks like I better go get my dodo before Kindle manage to kill it off.
This is so typical of consumerisation, where a good product gets killed by exposure to non savvy markets and then the savvy who steered the sheep to it abandon the product.
7 comments:
happens...a lot!
It's difficult to determine wether "go with what you know" is best or if "don't be afraid to try new things" is better.
I do though see the value in items that are spectacular single use devices over those that perform a number of tasks "pretty well."
My biggest question about e-books is why the costs are so close to that of printed books. It must be a perceived value thing.
Charles
about the cost, I can only speculate its down to "what the market will bear". But I want one because:
- I read a lot of PDF's of journal articles,
- there are quite a number of public domain books which are really low price
- I can get at the mobile versions of our major new papers (faster access)
- Its a cheap way to access email in a bigger form factor than my phone
:-)
I don't own a kindle but I like it's long battery life and daylight viewing.each good points. I hadn't thought about the public domain books. I will have to look around.
I don't own a kindle but I like it's long battery life and daylight viewing. Shame if they give that up...it really is the only thing they have going for themselves.
I have since been informed that the Kindle will continue to offer the eInk screen as an option.
I sure hope so :-)
I fully agree, producing yet another tablet is full regression IMHO and anyway whatever tablet they will produce right now will be obsolete in a few months with Samsung's Galaxy with Retina display or the iPad3.
The question is whether Amazon can afford to wait yet another delay in mass production of the eInk triton color display before updating the Kindle line or has to move on.
If so, the Mirasol display would have been a better alternative.
Personally, I don't care very much for color. But something I would really appreciate is
1, higher resolution e.g. for a more enjoyable reading experience of multicolumns research papers produced with LaTeX
2, touch screen for fast pdf zooming/scrolling
3, better support for document searching/indexing
4, SD card slot
All fulfillable with current eInk technology and decent processor + OS.
Anon, indeed Mirasol!
I've been dreaming of seeing stuff like this since I read of piezio actuated crystal refraction stuff for projectors back in the late 90's Just seems to have taken ages to come to market.
I can't speak to the upcoming new Amazon product. However, I can say this about the Kindle app on the iPhone. I have an iPhone 4 with the kindle app and I use it all the time. Surprisingly, I find the I can see the screen just fine sitting at the beach in full sun.
What I really like about the app vs. a Kindle is that at night when I go to bed, I can change the app to white text on a black background, turn the brightness down and read without any extra light disturbing my wife.
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