Directory  News Off The Wall |
| Amazon's Kindle. Ebooks For People Without Common Sense |
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 Amazon, the world's largest online retailer of books, is now entering the E-Book market with its very own branded E-Book Reader, The Kindle. Apart from the fact that the E-Book format has never really gone anywhere, along with the fact that the print business is experiencing a moderate surge in this day of supposed paperless (yeah right) lifestyles, we have to wonder exactly who Amazon expects to pony up for this $399 device. Coming in a roughly 5x7.5 inch form factor with a 6-inch 600x800 display, and sporting a massive (this is blatant sarcasm) 256MB of internal storage, It raises the question, who in their right mind would pay the estimated $399 Amazon expects? Rounding out the specs, it does posess a standard SD card slot for memory expansion and supports Wi-Fi and EVDO data services, though it lacks support for open document formats. A $400 device I can use to read electronic books that usually cost as much as a paperback on sale? With a 6-inch E-Ink screen, and a form factor larger than your average PDA? No support for open document formats? Where do we sign up! Amazon, drop us an email when your device has a better screen and costs at least a little less than 50 paperbacks. We'd suggest something like an Archos 605 Wi-Fi instead. Their 160GB model (apart from having over 600 times the storage capacity of The Kindle) features a touch screen with nearly the same resolution (800x480..and it's color), support not only for open documents formats and web browsing (at an additional cost) but video and audio as well. For the same price, we'd rather carry around 159GB of video and audio and a few E-Books too. Or purchase a laptop. This is hubris on steroids. {correction: What seems to be incorrect from the initial reports of the device is third-party format support. The Kindle is compatible Microsoft Word, HTML, TXT, JPEG, GIF, PNG, and BMP files, however not the popular PDF format out of the box. Amazon will convert PDF files to the Kindle format if they are sent to the company via e-mail.....addendum courtesy of Betanews} Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites           
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