Okay, I’ve bought too many Kindles of late to justify running out and buying a new one (sigh). But a few thoughts on the flurry of Kindles coming out.
- Kindle: The newest “traditional” Kindle is lighter, thinner, faster, and has no physical keyboard. $80
- Kindle Touch: Same form factor as the current Kindle, the same sunshine-friendly e-Ink, but lets you swipe the screen to turn the page and features a virtual keyboard. ($99 WiFi, $149 3G)
- Kindle Fire: An Amazon-dominated Android 7-inch tablet, which means music and movies as well as books, but with a more traditional tablet screen (color! quickness! glare!) ($199)
The Touch, and possibly the new Kindle, also now come with “X-Ray,” essentially a research file (with both Amazon and Wikipedia info) about each book you get when you download it. It’s a nice feature, and also a clever way to distinguish Amazon’s offerings from, oh, free (or pirated) ebooks.
Okay, the low prices on these are going to be hugely attractive to a lot of people, and major competition to a lot of tablet users and other competing eReaders (esp. the Nook). Granted, the tablet doesn’t have 3G connectivity, or GPS, or a camera — but that’s not going to be a huge turnoff for a number of consumers. (It also comes with a 3-month Amazon Prime trial; if you already have Prime, then you get free access to a number of Amazon video offerings.) And it’s got a proprietary browser that relies on Amazon’s computing ability on the Net to speed things up; it will be interesting to see how that works.
Personally, I don’t have enough need for a tablet to consider the Fire (and, if I did, I’d go for a tablet that was more purely Android, not so much the Amazon-controlled kind), but I can see where it would be attractive to a lot of people. The Touch sounds nice, though.
Like I said, not buying anything … yet … but at these prices, a replacement Kindle looks a lot more attractive in the mid-term.
I’m sure there will be lots more commentary, but here are a couple of articles about the reveal:
- Wired: Dynamite the Levees: Amazon’s Triple Threat to Undercut the Consumer Biz
- Wired: Playing With Fire: Amazon Launches $200 Tablet, Slashes Kindle Prices
- Techcitement: Will Amazon Kill The iPad With Fire?
UPDATE: The prices for the eInk Kindles are for the advertisment-pushing ones (which display ads on the sleep screen, rather than images). For Kindles without ads, the prices are $30-50 more. Ugh.