Retarded
I want to record here that I believe Bezos has missed a trick. But I can't. I can't because he hasn't. What he's actually done, as he desperately tries to emulate Apple and Steve Jobs, is retard the delivery of the written word by about 100 years.
Amazon's main pitch with this new, larger Kindle, is to students and newspaper readers. Well I for one only ever read one newspaper in paper form on a regular basis. It's free and it's in colour. All my other news comes free online.
Not having the option of viewing colour content would seem like a pretty obvious deal breaker to me. And not just for news geeks. Does the excitable Mr Bezos really believe students want to go back to black and white? What about the bar charts and pye charts, art, photography, medical diagrams?? Are students really supposed to view everything in black and white? No, 16 shades of grey is NOT a credible substitute.
I said he's retarded the delivery of the written word by about 100 years. But even before Victorian times, there were books with illuminated colour panels. Colour is almost as natural an element in our read media as it's possible to find. Black and white is a compromise - one that most students will never have known!
So, given that Sony are in on the reader thing too, the important question is: what WILL Apple do next? IS the tablet idea dead? Touch screens? Yes we have taken to them in a big way in the iPhone and the iPod Touch... but in a tablet form?
Well, as close as anyone can get to predicting Apple's next announcement, and bearing in mind that Steve likes to launch products with three "insanely great" features or functions, my money is now on an iBook! Yep, they could resurrect the name in an entirely new product: a sub notebook/ebook, book reader... that's also a phone...??
Oh, come on, you've read dumber ideas on the net. And you know you want one. And... if it's in clamshell form, with the two screens closely married in the centre, sanity could return to the form factor, as magazines become an option and double page spreads become possible. But of course students could benefit too. Lots of textbooks have large illustrations.
The reason Apple haven't done this before is battery longevity. But their experience with the iPhone, iPod Touch, MacBook Air and MacBook Pro is two-fold: Firstly they've developed small powerful batteries. But more importantly [at least for Apple], thanks to Jobs' reality distortion field, we've accepted limited capacity between charges in powerful little devices!
So, a new device that falls between the iPhone and the MacBook Air in size functionality, could end up not being too badly affected by power shortages.
If only Bezos had what Steve has - we could be using a colour Kindle DX, instead of still waiting for an announcement from Cupertino.
Engadget has just wrapped up
live coverage of Amazon's press event introducing the
Kindle DX, the next generation of Amazon's eBook reader. The Kindle DX, now available for pre-order at a price of $489 for shipment this summer, contains a 9.7" screen and is being positioned as a device for reading documents such as newspapers, textbooks, and research journal articles whose formats have not worked ideally with the smaller 6" screen of the current Kindle 2 model.
The Kindle DX features a built-in accelerometer that allows for auto-rotation of content between portrait and landscape orientations, and increased storage over the Kindle 2 of 3.3 GB, which provides space for up to 3,500 books periodicals, and documents. Like the Kindle 2, which will remain available at its current price of $359, the Kindle DX offers free 3G access through Sprint's network to allow downloading of content on the go. Native PDF support is also included.
The Boston Globe,
The New York Times and
The Washington Post are all planning to offer long-term subscriptions for Kindle newspaper editions at discounted prices.
Many people have viewed the Kindle as a competitor to the iPhone's eBook capabilities, with a
Kindle for iPhone application also offering compatibility with Amazon's service on the iPhone. Rumors of an Apple
"media pad" that could provide more direct competition to the Kindle on the eBook front have also been circulating in recent weeks.
Article Link:
Amazon Launches Kindle DX eBook Reader with 9.7" Screen