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Amazon’s Kindle Tablet Is Very Real. I’ve Seen It, Played With It.

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Re: Amazon’s Kindle Tablet Is Very Real. I’ve Seen It, Played With It.

#101

Post by danilocampos »

cageface wrote: post #41
Lewisham wrote: post #3

If Amazon are going to maintain an Android fork, I wonder how well Android apps will be able to play with it. It would be a huge disappointment if 2.2+ apps were unavailable (or installing Google Market for that matter). I can see why Amazon has gone down this path, but I do wonder if it's the right thing, rather than doing everyone's favorite/most hated carrier-specific bolt-ons instead. I also hope that Amazon does…

It seems like Amazon is gambling here that most users don't really care about apps that much, which jibes with my own intuitions about the android market. If you have a good web browser and email client the rest is unnecessary gravy, at least to a lot of people.

If they believed that, I'm not sure they would have gone to the trouble of building their own app distribution channel.

I would posit that they believe people care about apps a great deal, and that Amazon would like to be positioned to make some money from that demand, either through a cut of sales or by making their hardware more attractive since it "has apps."

They're the original kings of one-click buying, before Apple even sold apps. They'll make a killing and so will any developers who hitch their wagon to Amazon's strategy.

Re: Amazon’s Kindle Tablet Is Very Real. I’ve Seen It, Played With It.

#102

Post by joebadmo »

siglesias wrote: post #97
sodiumjoe wrote: post #2

In certain ways, this "post-PC" era that Apple's brought us into with the iPad seems like a step backward. We're going back to something more like the broadcast television model, where a more or less centralized authority produces the content for passive users to consume. These tablets just keep getting more and more optimized for that. I suppose it's somewhat natural, given the way the market works, but it seems our…

Two factors have led to the perception that tablets are "consumption" devices. 1) A tablet is a computer you can hold. Books and magazines have over time become optimized for holding (see size and weight) precisely due to the ergonomics of reading. Thus one would expect that tablets, which can store a vast number of books and magazines, would be "optimized" for such content. 2) Due to (1) it makes sense to trade powe…

You're right that it's certainly a step forward for consumption.

What I meant is that it's a step backward for what I saw as the trend toward a world in which the power to create things is more evenly distributed.

Don't get me wrong, I have a kindle, and I love it. But it's not just optimized for reading, it's optimized for reading content that's distributed through a centrally maintained distribution channel. (And while Amazon is trying to wrest control of that channel from the traditional publishers, it's a transfer of power from one central authority to another.) Which is why I appreciate tools like Readability's 'send to kindle' bookmarklet so much: it lets me read content from the bazaar more easily. But. Even then, I had to jump through hoops and the formatting isn't great. In short, it's not optimized.

Furthermore, while on the web on a PC I can read a blog post and then immediately comment, share, or respond in a blog post of my own, on my kindle I can't do any of that. I have to put my own system in place to even remember to do it later. In other words, the Kindle optimizes my consumption experience at the expense of my production experience in a way that's sort of profound in a way that I acutely feel is a step backward.

Re: Amazon’s Kindle Tablet Is Very Real. I’ve Seen It, Played With It.

#103

Post by roadnottaken »

moultano wrote: post #88
superuser2 wrote: post #40

E-ink made the Kindle. Tablets are exciting, but reading a novel on a backlit screen is no fun, and if it were, we'd read on our cell phones, because they're easier to carry around. This is disappointing. The Kindle 2 (the model I had) did one thing, and one thing phenomenally well. I don't want my kindle to be a Swiss army knife.

>but reading a novel on a backlit screen is no fun, and if it were, we'd read on our cell phones, because they're easier to carry around. Speak for yourself! I do this and love it. I find that the faster page flipping more than makes up for the slightly less readable text. The thing that I think most phone/tablet makers get wrong at the start is not putting it in "night mode" by default. White text on a black backgro…

It's impossible to read a non-e-ink screen in bright sunlight. I love my iPad, but I'm considering buying a Kindle just so I can read at the beach at my next vacation.

Re: Amazon’s Kindle Tablet Is Very Real. I’ve Seen It, Played With It.

#104

Post by xxpor »

gamble wrote: post #66

This will have a hard time competing with the iPad internationally, if it really is focused on deep integration with their digital stores. Amazon has been extremely reluctant to roll out their content stores beyond the US. For example, they still haven't expanded their mp3 store to Canada.

I doubt it's due to reluctance, but licensing issues.

Re: Amazon’s Kindle Tablet Is Very Real. I’ve Seen It, Played With It.

#105

Post by joebadmo »

ugh wrote: post #89
joebadmo wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, I agree that it's not one-dimensional. Tablets are making the consumption and light interaction aspects of computing accessible to a huge section of people for whom they were inaccessible before. And that's great. But the PC represented a tool that made the production aspect of computing accessible to a lot more people, too. And the web was a continuation of that trend. Tablets look like the end of that side t…

At least Apple, I think, sells music and videos and books and apps because people want them. Sure, they make some money (not much compared to the rest of the business) but they mostly do it to turn their devices into something people actually like to use. People want music, want videos, want books, want apps. The market gives them what they want. This is not a case of the market delivering something consumers don’t a…

I think you could have used the same argument for the media distribution model that existed before PCs were widely accessible: look, everyone is sitting on the couch, watching television, clearly that's what they want. But once we gave a lot of people access to PCs, we saw an explosion of interaction, content creation, communication, participation.

I don't think it's an overt conspiracy, it's just self-interest and centralized resources and power.

I believe that PCs did change the way people are, and the way they think. Not everyone, maybe not even a majority, at least not overtly. But I think it had a profound effect on the culture. I believe the Web made a difference. I believe the ways we have to access the Web make a difference.

You can point to dumb people continuing to be dumb and say there is no problem. I see a problem, and my solution is to talk about it, to try to get influential people to think about it, and think about making tools to empower creation by the technically lay (like me).

Re: Amazon’s Kindle Tablet Is Very Real. I’ve Seen It, Played With It.

#107

Post by anigbrowl »

joebadmo wrote: post #35
beaumartinez wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> our tools for consumption are advancing at a significantly greater rate than our tools for production Our tools for production have advanced as far as they can—what major changes have the desktop and laptop PC had over the last five years?

That's part of my point. The R&D is going into optimizing consumption instead of enabling production. I think there's still room for making it easier for people to produce expressive content. I don't think I'm necessarily imaginative enough to think of many, or the best, but I've started to try.[0] I think some people, particularly those working on Web stuff, are also trying. But I think web software is only one vect…

I disagree completely. I find my tablet a killer productivity tool, and only wish it had been available for use in filmmaking years ago. The only reason that I didn't build my production sound recording rig around a tablet computer was that the cost was so high; the only tablets powerful enough to run an operating system and record multi-channel audio were also built and priced for military or industrial use and severely limited by battery capacity. a 6-channel hard-disk based digital recorder cost close to $10,000 a few years ago. That same functionality (and much much more) will be available via tablet+USB audio interface within a year for $1000.

People said the exact same thing when the mouse and GUI came along - it was eye-candy, a substitute designed to distract the credulous from the fact that we had hit the limits of productivity and that it was all downhill from here on. They said the same thing about microcomputers and minicomputers as substitute for mainframe terminals.

Re: Amazon’s Kindle Tablet Is Very Real. I’ve Seen It, Played With It.

#108

Post by orangecat »

ugh wrote: post #30
abstractbill wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the things you just listed are forms of consumption, not production. The argument seems coherent enough to me. I'm not entirely convinced about the "centralized authority" part, but the "tools for consumption advancing faster than tools for production" seems true (and inevitable).

Improving consumption doesn’t imply much about creation. So what if consumption is easier? Does that mean less people will create something? Why? Creating something doesn’t get harder because consumption gets easier. I don’t see the causal connection. (That central authority bullshit is just patent nonsense.) Oh, and our tools for creation still are rapidly improving. Prices for computers have gone nothing but down.…

Creating something doesn’t get harder because consumption gets easier.

You're absolutely right that there's no necessary dichotomy, but in practice that's what's happening. The iPad could be an awesome platform for a Squeak-like development environment where you create and program a bunch of objects and have them interact with each other. But Apple won't allow such an app in their store which makes it unavailable to the large majority of users, and if they had their way jailbreaking your iPad to run it would be a federal crime.

Oh, and our tools for creation still are rapidly improving. Prices for computers have gone nothing but down. People are today able to buy a great PC and a tablet for the same price of a PC ten years ago.

That's true, today. But if tablets replace PCs for most people as many are predicting, PC prices will go up substantially: partly due to reduced economies of scale, and partly because reducing the market to professionals and geeks will allow more price discrimination.

Re: Amazon’s Kindle Tablet Is Very Real. I’ve Seen It, Played With It.

#109

Post by siglesias »

joebadmo wrote: post #102
siglesias wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two factors have led to the perception that tablets are "consumption" devices. 1) A tablet is a computer you can hold. Books and magazines have over time become optimized for holding (see size and weight) precisely due to the ergonomics of reading. Thus one would expect that tablets, which can store a vast number of books and magazines, would be "optimized" for such content. 2) Due to (1) it makes sense to trade powe…

You're right that it's certainly a step forward for consumption. What I meant is that it's a step backward for what I saw as the trend toward a world in which the power to create things is more evenly distributed. Don't get me wrong, I have a kindle, and I love it. But it's not just optimized for reading, it's optimized for reading content that's distributed through a centrally maintained distribution channel. (And w…

Let's try to clarify a little. There are two pillars to your argument, from what I can tell.

1) Content on post-PC devices is mediated through a central authority. You argue this is bad because presumably you cannot read whatever you want, but only what the central authority allows through. But reading whatever content you want is not enough, you also would have expected that any content you find out there that is optimized for a desktop browser be re-optimized by the tablet device for reading on it.

Response: A valid criticism of the Kindle, though in practice it seems that you are asking for an extension of what is already offered, implying a superset, not a sibling set of functionality. For example, the Kindle has always offered a browser but the technology didn't seem good enough to render a website quickly. Considering that Amazon had its pick of web-to-e-ink and books-to-e-ink, I can't immediately fault them for what they chose to throw their weight behind first--purely from the standpoint of practicality.

You criticized the iPad in your original post, but I don't see any of the iPad's existing functionality being at odds with choice of content provider or lack of optimization for reading web content (see Instapaper, Flipboard, built-in Readablility in iOS 5).

2) Your ability to "produce content" on these tablet devices is hindered.

Response: I addressed this point in my original post. This by and large is a result of the technology available for a holdable computer, not a nefarious choice on the part of the manufacturers. I think the ability to write blog posts on a plastic Kindle is asking a lot (would that even be enjoyable?), and that ability exists on an iPad today, in fact, since it was introduced.

Re: Amazon’s Kindle Tablet Is Very Real. I’ve Seen It, Played With It.

#110

Post by nigham »

sodiumjoe wrote: post #2

In certain ways, this "post-PC" era that Apple's brought us into with the iPad seems like a step backward. We're going back to something more like the broadcast television model, where a more or less centralized authority produces the content for passive users to consume. These tablets just keep getting more and more optimized for that. I suppose it's somewhat natural, given the way the market works, but it seems our…

A step backward is hardly the way I'd put it. Consumption-related technology as well as production related technologies are improving dramatically; we perceive the pace of consumption technology as being faster because consumption technology is far more applicable, and affects more users, and so it's more on the news. This is not a problem, there have always been more readers than writers, movie watchers than movie producers, software users than software creators.

There isn't too much discussion when there's a new version of Photoshop, or VIM, or Django, or Wordpress, or countless other technologies (e.g. http://www.asciiflow.com/) and platforms that help with content creation. One reason I read HN is that these items usually make it here. It's easier to create content now than at any time in the past.

How many people built software before iOS and Android? A few folks scattered across huge companies that either built consumer products or provided services for those companies. Today, iOS has half a million apps -- somebody produced them. Arguably the 'consumption-only' device that you think has taken us a step backward has given tens of thousands of people incentive to produce something. Amazon's vision is for authors to be able to self-publish without going through the hassle of publishers, giving more incentive for people to produce. Whereas making movies was once a task for multibillion dollar studios, Youtube has enabled something like the Khan Academy to start earning money by producing content.

You cannot have better and better consumption oriented devices in a vacuum. Someone has to produce what the masses are consuming.

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