“We’ve been waiting for this day: our little reader would finally become a big boy tablet – without having to resort to any sort of hackery. We knew it was coming and, as of now, owners of the Barnes & Noble Nook Color should be receiving notices that their devices are ready to drop those training wheels and run some proper apps. Flash web browsing, downloads, games, e-mail, it’s all here.”
Call me a Luddite, but one of the things I like best about the Kindle is that it doesn’t do those things. I can pull the plug, cut the cord, curl up with a good book or a white paper, and actually read.
….and you can still do that
and without paying anything extra, you can ALSO do lots of other things IF YOU CHOOSE to do so
I don’t see it like that at all. The nook color is a budget tablet, which is fine if that’s what you want. The kindle is an actual ebook reader. A device with an LCD screen is not in the same league as a device with a proper sunlight-readable screen. Sure you can read a book on an LCD screen, but that’s no better than a laptop. I don’t see the attraction of the nook. It’s an inferior tablet compared to the iPad or Xoom, and it’s an inferior book reading device compared to the Kindle. It does a bit of everything, but I wouldn’t be satisfied with either.
leos pondered…
Simple: It does those bits of everything for cheap.
Does that help explain things for you?
–bornagainpenguin
@leos: Yes, that’s precisely my point. The Kindle does one thing, and it does it well. I wouldn’t trade away the great reading experience for all those other features. What would be the point?
My problem with the Kindle is actually that it does too little for its price.
I’m very interested in an A4-sized reading-centric device, as reading on a 96dpi flashy LCD screen kills my eyes. However, paying the price of an equivalently-sized laptop is not okay, considering that this device does exactly one thing while the versatility of a laptop makes it the center of my everyday work
They’re only £111 here in the UK. That’s half the price of a netbook. It might not do everything, but the ops point was that everything is not what you always want.
That’s like buying an SUV just to drive to the shops and back. It’s unnecessary and it just bogs you down. The last thing I want when I’m reading is the Internet just being ‘there’, yearning to be looked at. Update notifications flashing, e-mail coming in. An endless stream of distractions. That’s not an environment conducive to reading.
I agree. So don’t configure email and internet if you don’t want it….or turn of Wifi. It is not as if it suddenly hid the “read ebook” function 5 menu’s deep like some smartphones did with phone/SMS functionality.
But getting such a major update in functionality for free is very welcome
Yup, at this price point I would totally buy it… but sadly, I guess that’s the price of the A5 version, which does not do what I want. As far as I remember, the large Kindle is still around €400.
The service which I’m looking for when I consider buying a Kindle is “being able to read electronic documents which I can’t simply get in a paper form, in a comfortable fashion”.
Most of the concerned documents are A4-sized manuals and scientific papers. Reading them on an A5-sized device. would result in super-tiny rendering, annoying scrolling, or hazardous refactoring of the document which generally simply doesn’t work.
At its current price point, the A4 Kindle is not a reasonable deal. I don’t necessarily ask for Internet access, games, or another specific other functionality, I just think that for this price, this device should do *something* else. It’s up to Amazon to find out what would be suitable (e.g. what about reducing the hassle of computer-reader transfers ?)
Edited 2011-04-26 13:33 UTC
The Kindle DX is too expensive, but I can see why they priced it that way. Its just far too big for casual reading, so its going to sell less than the basic version. Also the huge e-ink screen has to be pretty expensive, and the Kindle DX is pretty much the only place its used. Bottom line, its a niche product that you’ll be paying a premium for because they can’t just make it up in volume.
True, it has many reasons to be quite high-priced, however if it’s so expensive that Amazon don’t sell it, they have lost money developing it. As such, there’s an optimum to find for them, and I’m not sure they have found it yet…