Amazon Kindle (ebook thingy)

yeah it's weird, even searching for books on the amazon store will be more of a pain with a virtual keyboard, especially on the non-touch versions.

I AM THE TABLET

^ any tablet wars news makes me hear loutallica now

you know, RIM's playbook was actually a pretty awesome piece of hardware, they failed because a) no native integration with their bread-and-butter BES, b) no apps, and c) price. amazon's apparently integrated the fire pretty well into their own cloud/content arena and the price is double-dip recession appropriate so hey welcome to the partay

I'm glad to see tablet prices going down, but the Kindle Fire isn't tempting to me. It looks lousy as an ebook reader and android tablets still don't have many good games to buy.

And you know they're going to do the Apple trick of introducing a new model with a camera and 3G at some point in the next 18 months.

and the original model will cost $99 w/in the year

and as HP proved $99 is the price point at which consumers will gobble tablets like tictacs

Will this tablet allow me to buy things from Amazon?

is this thing iOS

Like the look of the touch Kindle, hate the keyboard on current Kindle. Fire? pff. Aspect ratio is all wrong for a start.

http://www.businessweek.com/printer/magazine/the-omnivore-09282011.html

Lots of quotes from my buddy Jateen in that one! He now runs jelli...

Aspect ratio is all wrong for a start.

Amazon's target market isn't calculating ratios

too lazy to read up on the new models - so I'm guessing the Fire has an iPad like display while the others still have e-ink (ie. what I'm really interested in)? I suppose it is not worth waiting for color e-ink in the short-term future?

so the fire is cloud-storage based but with no 3g support? that seems ... crippled

yeah kinda ruins it for traveling

it has 8gb onboard; presumably the idea is you sync what you might want to watch/listen to for the next (x) days every time you touch base somewhere with wifi; i'm not sure how good of an idea that is

relatedly, the 'free cloud storage' is for amazon-bought content

and all these models will be US only? wtf

90 quid in the UK, getting more and more tempted

i need to spend some time with one tho before i'm convinced it can replace a book, but just the thought of being able to carry around multi volume classics in my pocket is mad tempting

I was thinking £90 was a good price too, except the US price being $79 (roughly £50) makes me think 'fuck Amazon' tbh.

everybody fucks the UK over re: gadget prices tbf

I think the UK one is ad-free though, no?

haven't seen ads mentioned on the Amazon site, can't quite get my head around how it works anyway - u pay cash money for some shit that then bombs you with ads while you're trying to read??

when you wake it from standby

i find it a bullshit piece of price structuring, though, & hopefully they will phase it out

wouldn't want a pc that showed me adverts during startup either

then you buy the somewhat more expensive version

the Kindle 3 ads are easily ignored imo - screensaver graphics when you shut it off and a banner ad at the bottom of the home screen only. No ads while reading books, playing games, etc. Most are for special offers from amazon, though they were pushing that ABC show Revenge hard for a few weeks. I was wary before we bought one but it was worth saving the $50.

I also found that if you load up your Kindle and don't go online for 3-4 days, the ads disappear and are replaced with a generic "Please go online to receive special offers" graphic.

yeah the ads are only when the kindle is "off." i don't have ads but i can't see how it would be much more annoying than seeing the same 20 pictures of boring authors over and over again. there's apparently an easy way to hack the kindle and put your own pictures in, but i haven't tried it and it probably wouldn't work on the ad-based version.

You can jailbreak the cheap ad-supported Kindle to make it ad-free.

yeah i've got the ad-supported kindle and the ads really don't intrude at all--they're only there when it's off, and funny thing is i don't really look at the thing while it's off

cool. it just seems like an odd feature in the first place?

it really is, when it first came out i remember people saying it sounded like a joke the dev people came up with that the finance department thought was a real idea

i just emailed myself 4 books-in-pdf, testing out the "convert to kindle format" thing for the first time. we'll see how it goes. also lol at the idea that i'm gonna read all of these books.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rm92Tnp953c

I've read a few pdf books on my Kindle. Had to monkey with the text size to make it a good fit for the screen, but eventually they worked out fine.

Yeah I've loaded a couple wire-loaded PDFs on it before, but never gone through the whole "email to myself with 'convert' in the subject line" bit.

At US$200 I'm tempted to buy one just for the hell of it. Amazon won't even stop people rooting it.

huh!

i might finally get myself a kindle...thinking about getting the 3g keyboard instead of the new touch version, because apparently the new one only allows web browsing via wifi. since i don't have a smartphone or anything like that, it would be kinda nice to be email to check gmail or occasionally look up directions while i'm on the road. anyone use it for this now?

It's really really slow to use the browser, but does work okay. I've used it occasionally for ilxing and gmail.

Mine's the 2nd gen btw, don't know if things are different for the 3g keyboard newest ones.

Have the 3G and have used it for same in a pinch but yes it is hella slow

yeah i've been ilxing from home on it all week

just seen the new kindle, was i swindled in getting the old one for twice the price?

Pretty sure they'll be giving these away free in a few years.

new or old ones or both

i pulled the trigger on this. really like it so far...one of the weirdest things to get used to is looking at a percentage rather than page numbers, since i have a compulsive need to know how far i am in a book.

yah and the percentage can be deceptive--at one point i was really puzzled reading a history book because i was only at 57% and very near the historical present. as it turned out the book was about 40% index & notes!