We’re becoming more and more tempted by Amazon’s new cut-price Kindle device, and think they may have produced a real contender here.
Priced at a hugely competitive £109/£149 – that’s around a third the price of the cheapest iPad – the Kindle is affordable and attractive enough to really push eReaders into the mainstream.
Paperback reader
For just over a hundred pounds, the Kindle lets you carry around as many books as you could ever read in a lifetime – in something that weighs less than a paperback.
Add in a vast library of free books, 3G/Wi-Fi internet access, the ability to surf web pages and blogs, PDF reading, downloadable newspapers and magazines and a great battery life in a terrific form factor and you’ve got yourself an incredibly versatile gizmo.
We’re stoked
Is our wallet twitching? You betcha, and the good news is that Amazon’s vision for the device looks pretty much spot on too.
Here’s Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos talking about their plans for the Kindle on the Charlie Rose TV show:
“I would say something though like we’re trying to get out of the way. We’re not trying to create an experience. We want the author to create the experience. You know, if you’re going to read Nabokov or Hemmingway or we want us creating the experience for. That’s not our job.
Our job is to provide the convenience. That you can get books in 60 seconds, that you can carry your whole library with you so that you don’t get hand strain, so the device doesn’t get hot in your hands, so that it doesn’t cause eye strain, so that the battery life lasts a month, so you never get battery anxiety..
Now people say why don’t you add a touch screen? Well, the reason we don’t want a touch screen is if we’re going down that decision path, we say, okay, a touch screen and the current technology for touch screens — it’s called capacitive touch — it’s a layer that goes on top of that display. It adds glare.
The first thing that you do when you add a touch display is that you add a little extra layer of glass or plastic and a little bit of glare. So it’s very easy from an engineering point of view to add a touch screen but it’s not the right thing if you’re making no compromises and that’s our point of view on this. We want a device that’s for uncompromised reading and guess what? Our approach is working.”
(Click here if the video doesn’t play)
Order it here:
Kindle Wireless Reading Device, Wi-Fi, 6″ Display, Graphite -£109
Kindle Wireless Reading Device, Free 3G + Wi-Fi, 6″ Display, Graphite, 3G Works Globally -£149
Very tempted by this, great price and form factor. Ereader look like they’re about to go mass Market.