Kindle(r) Thoughts

Posted September 28, 2011
Written By Ken Stark
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Yes, I went there with the title. Never pass up a bad pun I say.

So hey, guess what today was. Go on, guess. That’s right, it’s Kindle Day! Or it should be anyways. Amazon made their big announcements about the Kindle line-up, and boy was it an exciting day. So here’s my thoughts on the whole thing.

$79 Kindle

Yes, you read that right, the base model Kindle clocks in at $79. If this doesn’t make you buy, nothing will. Now, there have been some sacrifices to hit this price point. This version is sans touchscreen, and thus has physical buttons for turning pages, menu, home screen and such.

I think it’s awesome that Amazon has not only dropped below the $100 price point, but really blown by it full force with this entry level Kindle. I was seriously considering just going for this cheapest model, but the geek in me objected to a couple things.

One, I really like touchscreens. Two, and sorta related, is that without a physical keyboard or a touchscreen, the keyboard entry is most like what you have with your game console, in that you have to use the arrow keys to select individual letters from the onscreen keyboard. Bleh.

Now really, I’m sure I could have gotten around that, but the extra features on the next level up pulled me in, and so we go to…

$99 Kindle Touch

So here’s what I’ve picked up for myself, the Kindle Touch. It had the right balance of features and price point to finally get me into an e-reader. I like things with touchscreens, what can I say? Now, this will be my first e-reader (once it arrives in November), so I really have no basis to compare it with previous models. Engadget is making it sound like the device is quite snappy with regards to page turning and even typing, at least for an E-Ink device.

Anyways, I’m not sure what else I can say about this until I get my hands on it, which will be a bit.

Next!

$149 Kindle Touch 3G

Hey, it’s the same as above, but with 3G! I personally didn’t see the need for this, though $50 for lifetime 3G downloads and such is pretty freaking awesome. I think it’s great that Amazon has made the whole process very simple, you buy the thing, you get books, and poof there they are. Simple. And keeping you from having to pay a bill to the cell carriers for the 3G coverage is really cool.

I’m sure if I were on the go traveling around a lot I might have considered this version.

$199 Kindle Fire

Holy crapola, Amazon’s got a tablet. I’ve said it before, with my limited funds I’m just not a tablet user. They’re toys to me, and I’ve got other stuff on my list of must-have buys. That said, it’s pretty cool to see a quality tablet at a decent price point like this. Now, they’re not just giving away everything here. The Fire is this inexpensive because Amazon trimmed the fat so to speak. No camera, no microphone, no bluetooth. Only 8GB of onboard memory, with no SD Card slot. That may not be much of an issue, because one thing Amazon is touting is cloud storage, but we’ll see. Seriously, they’re going cloud crazy over there.

You might say they have their heads in the clouds. (Remember what I said about puns?)

So it seems to me that they’ve taken out the least used features. Don’t yell at me, sit and think on that for a minute. We’re geeks, so yeah we’re gonna use the bluetooth, and want as much memory as you can possibly cram in. Average users though? Not quite as much.

Still, I won’t be buying it, because of the reasons before, but also, it’s first gen hardware. I try not to pick up first gen hardware, just as a general rule.

Final Musings

So in the end, well I pre-ordered the Touch, so I’m pretty excited. I’ve been wanting to pick up an e-reader for a while now, but the price point was just a bit too much for me. And hey, it also got me to throw a post up on here again. It’s been a while. So thanks Amazon! Can’t wait to get my hands on your product.