Amazon Kindle Posted on November 19th
[EDIT] A new electronic book reader called the Amazon Kindle has been announced. It’s a black and white “electronic-paper” display that is supposed to look and read like paper, in high resolution and no glare. It comes with a wireless, EVDO Sprint service that Amazon pays for so you can download books, magazines and blogs. You can also browse the internet and send emails, although emails you send with attachments will cost, $0.10/email. Blogs, magazines and newspapers will have a monthly subscription price. The device itself costs, $399.
I love to read. My home is cluttered with books. I like the feel, smell and beauty of books. I also love gadgets. I would be tempted to buy this gadget if it had a color screen, Tablet PC functionality so I could actually write notes in it, like I do on my Tablet PC. Oh, wait a minute, I could just download the books to my Tablet PC! I’ve tried reading books on both my Nokia n800 and my Treo 755p, and my Tablet PC. It’s just not the same. I love the sensory experience of reading real books. It would be nice to get rid of the clutter, though, and store all my books on the Kindle instead of bookshelves would be nice.
Amazon will have to make this gadget more appealing available with a color display, and in other color choices (black) than just white for that $399 price. The device will have to be beautiful to look at, feel nice to hold, allow me to annotate with a pen, and display text and especially images, in full color, and do a whole lot more to replace my real books. After watching the introductory video on Amazon, and seeing the Kindle at different angles, it’s actually not bad looking and a lot thinner than the pictures on various news sites made it appear, I just wish it was in black or even better, red like the Treo 650 or the Crimson Treo 755P (which I own–and bought because it was in Crimson even though I always wanted a Treo long before that). Amazon, why not let us download an iTunes like software application to our existing mobile devices instead? Then we can consume e-books and magazines on our terms and you can still make lots of money from the subscriptions, without having to pay for a wireless access on proprietary hardware. How about creating an accessory that would allow us to copy and paste from the Kindle to our PCs via the USB port on the Kindle? So if for example, we’re doing research and writing a paper/blogging on our PCs we can highlight text and send it to the PCs clipboard somehow? That would be very useful… hmm maybe by the time I can afford to splurge on one, it will come in black and have a color display. Or better yet, the price would have come down $200 just like the iPhone did after a little over a couple of months.
