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Amazon Unveils $199 Kindle Fire Tablet

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Re: Amazon Unveils $199 Kindle Fire Tablet

#51

Post by sthulbourn »

estel wrote: post #33
Lewisham wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great price point. It's basically in impulse zone: "This book is 6 dollars cheaper at Kindle price... if I buy 12 it pays for itself..." but note there's no physical keyboard. Without a touch screen, it looks like it won't do note-taking, which is a bummer.

I'd be interested to see what % of Kindle users make use of the Keyboard. I'm pretty sure that I've only ever touched it for inputting URIs when web-browsing from abroad.

I've always thought it was retarded to include a hardware keyboard on a device that will be used ~95% of the time for reading stuff. It's a really smart move to remove it.

Re: Amazon Unveils $199 Kindle Fire Tablet

#52

Post by dmix »

tjogin wrote: post #38
dmix wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine thats what they said in the boardroom. But its still a layer ontop of Android.

It isn't, really. They've built their Kindle product on the Android codebase, but it isn't Android and they won't be allowed to even call it an Android tablet, because they're not dancing to Google's tune. The new Kindle tablet may be sort-of compatible with Android today, but this isn't likely to remain the case since there is no feedback loop or collaboration between Google and Amazon in this.

So when Ubuntu releases their own app store combined with a new UI, it won't be "Linux" anymore? Just software built on top of the "Linux codebase"?

Re: Amazon Unveils $199 Kindle Fire Tablet

#53

Post by ableal »

acabal wrote: post #25
kyleslattery wrote: post #3

Apparently there will be a $79 regular Kindle as well: http://thisismynext.com/2011/09/28/amazon-launches-79-kindle...

Kindle Touch looks really similar to the Nook Touch, which is a truly excellent product. But Nook Touch still has a killer feature for a ebook nerd like me: it reads epubs. I'm assuming the KT will still be locked in to Amazon's ridiculous .mobi format, so I'm sticking with my NT for now.

> ridiculous .mobi format

What's ridiculous about it, apart from the competing DRM schemes and Amazon vs. all others aspect? Both formats are essentially zipped XHTML ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_e-book_formats#Mo... ), and are offered by many free ebook sites (feedbooks.com, manybooks.net, gutenberg.org etc.)

The BN Nooks were not available outside the U.S. (and Canada?) last time I looked.

Re: Amazon Unveils $199 Kindle Fire Tablet

#56

Post by smackfu »

Lewisham wrote: post #20
kyleslattery wrote: post #3

Apparently there will be a $79 regular Kindle as well: http://thisismynext.com/2011/09/28/amazon-launches-79-kindle...

Great price point. It's basically in impulse zone: "This book is 6 dollars cheaper at Kindle price... if I buy 12 it pays for itself..." but note there's no physical keyboard. Without a touch screen, it looks like it won't do note-taking, which is a bummer.

Looks like they will still be selling the previous version as "Kindle Keyboard" for the same price as it is now.

Re: Amazon Unveils $199 Kindle Fire Tablet

#59

Post by gbog »

AndreiVajnaII wrote: post #31
acabal wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kindle Touch looks really similar to the Nook Touch, which is a truly excellent product. But Nook Touch still has a killer feature for a ebook nerd like me: it reads epubs. I'm assuming the KT will still be locked in to Amazon's ridiculous .mobi format, so I'm sticking with my NT for now.

The Kindle Touch's killer feature would be better PDF support. The Nook Touch looks totally unusable for PDFs.

It seems to me that PDF is not a format suitable for much more than printing on paper.

A very important feature of Kindle is to allow choosing font size. It make it an ideal tool for elders. But PDF documents have a fixed layout that won't allow resizing font conveniently, or you have to break it in pieces.

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