“Funny, isn’t it? Amazon is gearing up for the start of the telltale holiday shopping season and it’s promoting a product that has been out of stock for nearly a day? That is so unlike the country’s leading e-tailer.” – Motley Fool earlier this week.
More from the Fool: “Keep in mind that those brown Microsoft Zunes sold briskly at $250 last year when they first hit the market. Amazon is now clearing them out at $90 a pop. The first batch of Sony PS3s also flew off the shelves last year. A few price cuts—and hardware upgrades—later, they are readily available.” Oh, and how about expectations that the Segway (photo) would single-handedly change civilization? Parallels here?
Related: Kindle hate among many New York Times commenters. I myself hope the Kindle succeeds, so other e-book products and services will take off. I just want Bezos to do .epub and work on a more refined reader that isn’t so hard on batteries. Getting rid of the DRM or at least experimenting with social DRM wouldn’t hurt, either.
I like everyone who writes sentences such as these from that Post article:
>>>You can wirelessly send questions to a team of editors, who will grab answers for you from the Web and send them back to you for free. There’s even a rudimentary Web browser that allows you to surf for free.
The implication is “free — forever.” As if they can’t even think of it ever ending. But I guess in this post-9/11 time, journalists have really suspended their powers of discernment!
The howls of fury will be loud indeed when people start being told they’re running up bills and must be charged for this “free” stuff.
I agree, Mike! Detail: The Washington Post was picking up an AP review. Thanks. David
The battery life reported there is entirely due to the EVDO. Turn on wireless, don’t touch the device at all, and the batteries drain literally in less than 24 hours. I was extremely annoyed to travel to the inlaws for Thanksgiving, pull out the new device to show off, and find the battery completely dead even though I had charged it fully the night before and hadn’t touched it at all.
Its just crazy there isn’t some sort of automatic “turn the wireless off after X minutes of inactivity” setting.
There is an “Update Kindle” menu option, so hopefully at some point they’ll push out an update that implements something like that.
“The howls of fury will be loud indeed when people start being told they’re running up bills and must be charged for this “free” stuff.”
Agreed. Would have been much better to go with WiFi, but then I assume you have lots of issues with configuration, etc., and then it just doesn’t work out of the box for mom.
I’d imagine they’ll announce a monthly flat rate for web browsing soon, while keeping the free access to their store. But the web browsing in monochrome isn’t likely to attract that many subscribers, especially because users are likely to trend toward folks who already have better substitutes. I much prefer browsing on my Blackberry than the Kindle.
[…] Kindle and Sony eBook readers. David Rothman who blogs many of the TeleRead pieces admits to being close to being a Kindle supporter; he probably would be, if only it eschewed DRM and embraced the .epub Open eBook standard. But what […]