151–160 of 200 posts
I really don't get the point of a Kindle with a battery life of only 10 hours.
Personally I'd kill for a tablet that could last the eighteen hours door-to-door from SFO to SYD, but hey, ten hours is a good start.
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…
Source: http://blogs.howstuffworks.com/2010/05/19/backlit-readers-co...
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.
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…
Content consumption devices (aka radio, TV, books, mp3 players) have not had a significant advance in decades. The browser was the first new conduit that moved people away from these devices. These people used a PC, but merely as a content consumption device, NOT as a content creation device!
Now tablets - which are mostly hardware for browsers, becoming more so with 'cloud' services - are becoming personal content consumption devices.
As long as there's a browser, it's a window to the world of content - not just the central authority's content.
For so long producers have wanted to have a powerful computing device in every hand. Now that day is closer!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 p…
That's an interesting take. I guess the way it looks to me is that the last dramatic production advancement for lay people was the advent of blogging. The two major advancements after that have been social networking and tablets, which both somewhat degrade production signal. The observation that an optimized consumption experience gives producers a bigger audience is an interesting one. But I think what I'm objectin…
What is missing here is actually a perspective on how consumption is a form of production itself– of perspective. Better access, and new forms and content for consumption, will create (that word!) new forms of consciousness, which are fed back in production.
Consumption today seem to me more of a form of networking of sources and producers, production of perspective. There's so little that we yet know about our still new internet reality. Polishing consumption may very well be necessary in order for us to make sense of our current social/technological stage, to produce new forms of social networking/organization and ultimately new every-other-form of content/artifacts.
To dive in at the deep end: consuming stuff on a tablet, with the accompanying delights and frustrations - is part of the networking of the device itself into the cycle of human content consumption-production. There's no reason to believe that the tablet as an object is finished, and that it won't evolve to fit the 'expressive needs' of people – your own frustration/pessimism are a part of this cycle, both leading people to not use tablets, to look for different desktop paradigms, new forms of interaction with tablets, improving tablet ergonomics and on and on. You're surely not alone.
The cycle won't stop. We must not get down when there's so much great work to be done! Yet, again, also our negative feeling in this regard is ultimately productive, if we let it.
I really hope they don't hope to make this a replacement for their eink non-backlit devices. That would be a disaster :(
Five or Six Things That Occurred In My Brain When I Read This Article: (1) $250 with free Prime? Buying one for sure, maybe two. (2) No camera? Ugg. At least a front facing camera for Skype pls, I'll pay extra. (3) November, meh I was hoping late September. (4) Eclair fork? That has to be wrong lots of optimizations made in Froyo which has been available for over a year. (5) Maybe this provided some additional incent…
I'm very interested to hear the details of "free Prime". Depending on the implementation then this might suddenly become a thing I will buy because it makes financial sense, regardless of its technical merit.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Programming is not a content creation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The iPad and other tablets are not great tools for writing. Emails or comments on HN (another one of those things that wasn’t possible for very many people one or two decades ago) work great, longer or more complicated stuff quite often not. There are, however, quite a few use cases where tablets are better tools for content creation than, say, a PC or at least could become better tools given time and software. But I…
I agree with the thrust of your argument. Many are drawing a false sense of opposition between consumption and creation. Listening to music (consuming) became insanely easy in the last decade, but, surprise surprise, the tools to create music improved just as dramatically. Just as importantly, the ease of consuming enabled musicians to draw on an unprecedented pool of influences - many genres have undergone wild tran…
I sure think this IS a Golden Age. The bizarre and 'negative' traits, and our moments of distress, easily hide it for us - but it's here and now. We just need to learn how to create a society out of the jumble (ie, planet) that's out there...
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…
This seems like a misstep to me that will ultimately hurt users and developers. If any API incompatibilities emerge (beyond the normal API level that Android uses to distinguish between release APIs) then developers will be forced to fork their own products and maintain 2 separate release channels -- one for the Android market and one for the Kindle market. Beyond that, Android will continue to fly ahead with each re…
Amazon is an online:
* media retailer * department store retailer * book seller * catalog warehouse (third-party resellers)
They have broad distribution agreements with thousands upon thousands of merchants in all product spaces (including media). No other tablet manufacturer (not even Apple) has the kind of vertical reach that Amazon does.
Amazon is also a pioneer in understanding the way their customers shop for products. Amazon's iOS apps are some of the coolest shopping applications I've used. Scan a bar code of a product at a store, and instantly find out if you can buy it cheaper on Amazon. Usually you can. That's smart. They constantly refine their website to fit customer usage patterns. They know how their customers behave, and they know how to adapt to customer change.
Remember when the iPad came out and geeks everywhere united in sentiment that it would fail. "It doesn't run a full desktop, OS!!! It's doomed to fail!!!" That's a caricature of tech punditry at the time of the iPad launch. Today, the iPad is way out front. All those arguments sound eerily familiar to:
"If any API incompatibilities emerge (beyond the normal API level that Android uses to distinguish between release APIs) then developers will be forced to fork their own products and maintain 2 separate release channels..."
This is all geek speak. Turns out, the market doesn't really care.
Amazon, like Apple, isn't trying to enter a market, they're trying to create one.
I'm not smart enough to know if they'll be successful, but if you look at Amazon as a company, they're an entirely different animal from Apple, Google, or Samsung. I think they have the tools to make it happen, but it will ultimately come down to execution.