7 ms·

Amazon Has High Hopes for Its iPad Competitor

99 points by garbowza 15y ago

teach 15y ago
"We're trying to remove the barrier between 'I want that' and 'I have it'." - Sam Hall, Amazon's director of wireless products and service I don't know about others, but my consumption of digital music from Amazon increased by about $20 a month within just a few weeks of them adding their Amazon Cloud Drive Player and their one-click purchase that dumps the album directly and instantaneously into the Cloud Drive. With an Amazon tablet, I can see something similar happening for digital video.
itswindy 15y ago
"With the tablet, Amazon is a follower. That’s never as good." Unless you sell it for half a price is good enough for most people.
- jacques_chester 15y ago
  > ... Amazon is a follower. That’s never as good. I guess this is why Friendster have crushed MySpace and Facebook in turn.
  - tybris 15y ago
    Did you look that up on Excite or on Altavista?
    - jacques_chester 15y ago
      A friend on ICQ told me to check it out on his .plan file website.
atldev 15y ago
I'm hoping Amazon will have a pretty good hook. I want to be excited to buy one. However, the kindle book offering is not enough. I love the kindle, but the kindle app is already fantastic on the iPad. So I don't need a new kindle tablet. Give me something new, Amazon. Or open up the developer program and let us help you.
- jonknee 15y ago
  Some of the rumors make it interesting--free Prime membership namely. That ties it in with all the free streaming video they have which Apple has no match for.
  - sliverstorm 15y ago
    Yea, I'm pretty optomistic for it. Amazon doesn't have the romantic Apple image and their rounded corners, but they do seem to have remarkable savvy.
- mmahemoff 15y ago
  If you have an iPad already, you're not Amazon's primary target. That said, the 7" "mini-tablet" form factor might be one hook. It's actually a great size, great for reading, and I like taking mine to meetups where I just want web access and a little twitter. 7" tablets also fit in handbags and more pockets than most people realize (like back pocket of most of my jeans!). Up to now, these devices have mostly been way too expensive - close to iPad prices - or cheapo devices (apad/hipad) with serious shortcomings, e.g. No Android market and ancient versions of the OS. In my case, I paid £160 for a device with poor quality control, had to return it as the wifi was broken. I changed my Google password a while ago, which broke Market and GMail and means I have to hard-reset in order to install any new apps. (There was no error message from those programs and had to trawl through forums to work out why there exiting immediately.) So tne 7" devices today have not exactly provided the out-of-the-box iPad experience. "it's all about the software" as many hardware people say these days. If Amazon can build a smooth user interface, it will be the first inexpensive mini-tablet which "just works".
  - berntb 15y ago
    >>That said, the 7" "mini-tablet" form factor might be one hook. It's actually a great size, great for reading I get that 7" works for reading literature and has better portability. That is Amazon's home market. The problem is that 7" makes full document reading (pdf, web pages, code, etc) hard. I'd pay for an 12" iPad, since my eyes are older than 40. (-: Maybe I need a fresnel lens, Brazil style? :-)
steele 15y ago
Maybe v2 will be webOS? One can dream, no?
- joshlane4 15y ago
  I'm not sure why you would want WebOS? Android sounds great to me.
- LeafStorm 15y ago
  Amazon's already invested a lot in the Android platform with the Amazon Appstore and all the other assorted Amazon Android apps. Considering that migrating to WebOS would require Amazon to: (a) actually obtain the rights to WebOS (whereas Android they can just fork a version from git), (b) retool all their existing app infrastructure to support WebOS, and (c) promoting WebOS to developers when probably the only WebOS device that would be available to them would be the new Kindle and the fire-saled Touchpads, I don't really see them moving to WebOS, or away from Android in general, anytime soon.
  - hollerith 15y ago
    >whereas Android they can just fork a version from git No, they also have to negotiate patent licenses or find some other way to avoid injunctions. (Sadly.)
- mmahemoff 15y ago
  It's funny that the general incompetence of HP's new leader is one of the factors which led to Amazon's success over the years, especially with third-party suppliers. Unless they arranged to buy the OS outright (very unlikely given their existing commitments), we won't see it.
cageface 15y ago
“The No. 1 thing consumers do on tablets is e-mail,” said Sarah Rotman Epps, a Forrester analyst. “The No. 2 thing is look up stuff on the Web...." Apple loves to tout sales numbers for the app store but this jibes with my own experience. It's nice to have a healthy stock of third-party apps to choose from but if your core email, web, & fb/twitter apps are solid you're 90% there for most users and can start chopping secondary features and specs to undercut the iPad.
- greendestiny 15y ago
  I mostly use my Touchpad for email. Some web browsing. Games for the kids. I plan to install android when I can though. All platforms have decent email experiences, web browsing on a tablet is actually highly overrated. Its really native apps that differentiate the experience, and its native apps that can be a joy to use.
  - saurik 15y ago
    FWIW, the Touchpad's (WebOS) browser is even worse than the Android browser (even Google often fails to render in it, since they released Google+, yielding horribly hilarious results); if you were using Android or iOS you might not feel the same away about browsing on the tablet being "highly overrated".
    - greendestiny 15y ago
      Could be, I have used other devices. I find most web pages aren't especially easy to interact with on a touch device. Links are too small to touch and mobile versions are made for much smaller devices.
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
    - jsnell 15y ago
chugger 15y ago
What's the value add other than tight integration with Amazon Cloud, etc. ? is it compelling enough for most users to ditch the Xoom, Touch Pad, Galaxy Tab, etc. over this tablet?
- jonknee 15y ago
  Most users aren't on any of those, Amazon could have a good quarter and sell more of their tablet than all of those combined. That said, it's going to be half (or even less) the price and have seamless access to a very wide array of content. I don't think they're worried about the Xoom, or the discontinued TouchPad and or the new Galaxy Tab that's illegal to sell in most major markets... They're clearly leveling up against the iPad.
latch 15y ago
I'm just not ready to bet against Apple. I think we're at the point where the only way for anyone to take any significant chunk of profit from Apple's [growing] core business, is for Apple to have a couple significant missteps.
- riffraff 15y ago
  how do you define significant? As far as I can tell they did have a couple missteps (Apple TV, Ping) already.
  - chugger 15y ago
    Apple TV is doing well for a "hobby" compared to Google TV. and Ping's failure is not hurting Apple at all. Amazon however, does not nearly have as much cash and resources as Apple or Google. if Amazon fails in this it can potentially hurt their bottom line.
  - latch 15y ago
    None of those missteps are on their core products. I'm talking something like Xbox 360's 33% failure rate (which doesn't even seem to have damaged their brand at all, surprisingly). At this point, their brand is so strong, you'd need something huge...I can't even think of anything besides serious failure rates on iPhones or iPads.
- tybris 15y ago
  Why? I don't see the precedent. Android phones are overtaking iPhones. Why wouldn't Android tablets?
  - latch 15y ago
    humm..it's a bit like saying that your chance of building a successful search engine, without Google first doing something incredibly stupid, are pretty slim. There's a billion precedents. GM, 3dfx, pre-tick-tock Intel, George Lucas.
    - 15y ago
dafarian 15y ago
Apple has 75% of the tablet market, Samsung is gaining quickly as a formidable competitor (specially after the Apple/Samsung European showdown which gave more exposure to the compatibility of Samsung). Amazon might throw a lot of money at it, but my money is on Samsung & Apple battling it out. I think Amazon is doing this because Apple shut them out from their App store.
joshwa 15y ago
Apple sells movies, music and books in order to sell devices. Amazon sells devices in order to sell books, movies and music. This.
- philwelch 15y ago
  Obvious follow up: then why not let Apple sell the devices and Amazon sell the content?
  - notauser 15y ago
    Because Apple want a 30% cut of all content sold via the iPad, which represents a larger margin than Amazon can afford to give away whilst remaining a profitable distributor.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - Someone 15y ago
    Because Apple does not accept that solution? The chunk they want would seriously eat into Amazon's margins.
  - bad_user 15y ago
    Big companies would be stupid to rely on anybody else's platform. That's why Google released Android in the first place.
  - zach 15y ago
    Why not let Apple sell the devices and Amazon sell the content? Great question. It does seem efficient, what with comparative advantage and all. Because then then that's an experience that's either customer-integrated or concessionary. A customer-integrated experience means bringing your own food to the stadium, maybe from the place across the street. That's what MP3 players were like before the iTunes Music Store. Dedicated experts love customer-integrated experiences, but they're the only ones. A concessionary experience means renting the stadium's food stand to the highest bidder. The highest bidders are either cheapskates or have deeper business motives. The best case is that they just want to expose consumers to some other brand. But when the parties have overlapping interests, things get messy and unstable (i.e. Google on Yahoo, otherwise a great win for users). These types of experiences both have an annoying tendency to suck out loud. Apple's mastery in creating great integrated experiences is one of Steve Jobs' greatest legacies. It's something great creators strive to do and customers are happy to pay for. If Apple were to move away from providing a well-integrated experience, they'd be moving away from not only their key strength but their key value to their users.
acabal 15y ago
I hope that doesn't mean they're abandoning development on their e-ink devices, or relegating them to third-class citizens. The only reason I'd buy a reading device is if staring at it for 2+ hours didn't give me a headache like a backlit tablet does. (And an all-purpose tablet like an iPad still doesn't interest me enough to buy anyway.)
- ZeroGravitas 15y ago
  Have you tried the various OLED (AMOLED, SAMOLED etc.) devices? When showing black they are effectively off, so white (or green or gray) on black text is relatively soothing. My main reading use case is in bed at night. I have a little booklight for reading actual paper books, but I think I'm waiting for an AMOLED 8" tablet for e-book reading. It works pretty darn well for my phone in low light conditions. (In fact the main competition for an 8" tablet would be one of those giant 5" phones with AMOLED).
  - 1880 15y ago
    Sometimes, OLED screens are even worse than your average LCD. For example, the Galaxy S has beautiful colors and the bright of a thousand suns, but it's awful for simple white-on-black text. The glyphs are very irregular and have jaggies. I think it's because of the PenTile arrangement of the pixels: http://pentileblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/pentile-sharp-text1.jpg http://pentileblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/pentile-sh...
    - ZeroGravitas 15y ago
      I have an OLED device, with probably the cheapest version of this technology available, it's using pentile, and I haven't noticed the issue with white text on black though it is occasionally noticeable (though never annoying) to me in other contexts. My device does have a small screen and therefore a relatively high pixel density though. Until the jump to Super AMOLED HD a lot of phones seemed to be putting the same pixel density (and pentile arrangement) on phones with screens an inch bigger e.g. my device is 266ppi vs 233ppi for the Galaxy S. People seem to get a bit religious about pentile. It doesn't make any sense to dismiss (or accept) it without considering all the other parameters. It's designed to make it easier and cheaper to hit certain resolutions and densities. If I could get more pixels or density for the same money then I'd happily take pentile. If there's not much extra gain over not using it, or not much extra cost, then I'd happily leave it out. It also, for whatever technical reason, seems mostly to be associated with OLED technologies, though OLED does not necessarily imply pentile. I think Samsung brands their non-pentile AMOLEDs as SAMOLED plus and they have them either on the market or due very soon in both big phone, massive phone and mid-size tablet varieties. However, OLED does have the one advantage I mentioned about reading in the dark which decides this for me. For that reason alone I personally am waiting for a sufficiently high-density AMOLED tablet for reading purposes. Pentile will be just one factor in weighing up my options, certainly not a deal breaker.
dramaticus3 15y ago
> [The iPad has] set off a revolution in progress about how entertainment and other media are consumed. Is this really true ? I know I'm a bit provincial but I don't know anyone with an iPad and have only ever seen anyone with one TV. I'm not even sure my friend who works in the Apple store has one at home (he's never mentioned it and he's the kind who would). EDIT I got my reply from asking him. It's revolutionised how entertainment and other media are consumed in his house. me: how do you like it ? he: Very much. Lou uses it all the time ... She hasn't used a pc since.
srik 15y ago
"AMAZON PRIME" - thats whats being overlooked. Imagine this. One prime account that would give you netflix like access to all the music, books and movies from amazon's library. Music and Video is pretty much at par with the rest of the iTunes competitors already and once Amazon gathers enough momentum, the book publishers will bow and then Amazon Prime will hold so much value, it wouldn't be sensible to not have one.
77ko 15y ago
The one thing I like about Amazon ebooks is that you can set your country as USA, and than use any credit card to buy American ebooks. I hope that continues with Amazon's tablet and the video and other content they'll be selling, as American digital prices and content selection are cheaper and wider than anywhere else in the world. Of course, the RIAA and MPAA of the world's will be fighting tooth and nail over regional restrictions, I have a feeling Amazon made it easy to bypass regional restrictions because book publishers are technologically challenged and didn't quite realize what happened. Of course, there is always the piratebay for countries which aren't in the G7...
patrickgzill 15y ago
A Kindle DX that can take decent notes/todo lists (maybe with an add-on keyboard) and handle email and web tasks, would be pretty nice.

99 points by garbowza 15y ago

teach 15y ago

"We're trying to remove the barrier between 'I want that' and 'I have it'." - Sam Hall, Amazon's director of wireless products and service I don't know about others, but my consumption of digital music from Amazon increased by about $20 a month within just a few weeks of them adding their Amazon Cloud Drive Player and their one-click purchase that dumps the album directly and instantaneously into the Cloud Drive. With an Amazon tablet, I can see something similar happening for digital video.

itswindy 15y ago

"With the tablet, Amazon is a follower. That’s never as good." Unless you sell it for half a price is good enough for most people.

jacques_chester 15y ago
> ... Amazon is a follower. That’s never as good. I guess this is why Friendster have crushed MySpace and Facebook in turn.
- tybris 15y ago
  Did you look that up on Excite or on Altavista?
  - jacques_chester 15y ago
    A friend on ICQ told me to check it out on his .plan file website.

atldev 15y ago

I'm hoping Amazon will have a pretty good hook. I want to be excited to buy one. However, the kindle book offering is not enough. I love the kindle, but the kindle app is already fantastic on the iPad. So I don't need a new kindle tablet. Give me something new, Amazon. Or open up the developer program and let us help you.

jonknee 15y ago
Some of the rumors make it interesting--free Prime membership namely. That ties it in with all the free streaming video they have which Apple has no match for.
- sliverstorm 15y ago
  Yea, I'm pretty optomistic for it. Amazon doesn't have the romantic Apple image and their rounded corners, but they do seem to have remarkable savvy.
mmahemoff 15y ago
If you have an iPad already, you're not Amazon's primary target. That said, the 7" "mini-tablet" form factor might be one hook. It's actually a great size, great for reading, and I like taking mine to meetups where I just want web access and a little twitter. 7" tablets also fit in handbags and more pockets than most people realize (like back pocket of most of my jeans!). Up to now, these devices have mostly been way too expensive - close to iPad prices - or cheapo devices (apad/hipad) with serious shortcomings, e.g. No Android market and ancient versions of the OS. In my case, I paid £160 for a device with poor quality control, had to return it as the wifi was broken. I changed my Google password a while ago, which broke Market and GMail and means I have to hard-reset in order to install any new apps. (There was no error message from those programs and had to trawl through forums to work out why there exiting immediately.) So tne 7" devices today have not exactly provided the out-of-the-box iPad experience. "it's all about the software" as many hardware people say these days. If Amazon can build a smooth user interface, it will be the first inexpensive mini-tablet which "just works".
- berntb 15y ago
  >>That said, the 7" "mini-tablet" form factor might be one hook. It's actually a great size, great for reading I get that 7" works for reading literature and has better portability. That is Amazon's home market. The problem is that 7" makes full document reading (pdf, web pages, code, etc) hard. I'd pay for an 12" iPad, since my eyes are older than 40. (-: Maybe I need a fresnel lens, Brazil style? :-)

steele 15y ago

Maybe v2 will be webOS? One can dream, no?

joshlane4 15y ago
I'm not sure why you would want WebOS? Android sounds great to me.
LeafStorm 15y ago
Amazon's already invested a lot in the Android platform with the Amazon Appstore and all the other assorted Amazon Android apps. Considering that migrating to WebOS would require Amazon to: (a) actually obtain the rights to WebOS (whereas Android they can just fork a version from git), (b) retool all their existing app infrastructure to support WebOS, and (c) promoting WebOS to developers when probably the only WebOS device that would be available to them would be the new Kindle and the fire-saled Touchpads, I don't really see them moving to WebOS, or away from Android in general, anytime soon.
- hollerith 15y ago
  >whereas Android they can just fork a version from git No, they also have to negotiate patent licenses or find some other way to avoid injunctions. (Sadly.)
mmahemoff 15y ago
It's funny that the general incompetence of HP's new leader is one of the factors which led to Amazon's success over the years, especially with third-party suppliers. Unless they arranged to buy the OS outright (very unlikely given their existing commitments), we won't see it.

cageface 15y ago

“The No. 1 thing consumers do on tablets is e-mail,” said Sarah Rotman Epps, a Forrester analyst. “The No. 2 thing is look up stuff on the Web...." Apple loves to tout sales numbers for the app store but this jibes with my own experience. It's nice to have a healthy stock of third-party apps to choose from but if your core email, web, & fb/twitter apps are solid you're 90% there for most users and can start chopping secondary features and specs to undercut the iPad.

greendestiny 15y ago
I mostly use my Touchpad for email. Some web browsing. Games for the kids. I plan to install android when I can though. All platforms have decent email experiences, web browsing on a tablet is actually highly overrated. Its really native apps that differentiate the experience, and its native apps that can be a joy to use.
- saurik 15y ago
  FWIW, the Touchpad's (WebOS) browser is even worse than the Android browser (even Google often fails to render in it, since they released Google+, yielding horribly hilarious results); if you were using Android or iOS you might not feel the same away about browsing on the tablet being "highly overrated".
  - greendestiny 15y ago
    Could be, I have used other devices. I find most web pages aren't especially easy to interact with on a touch device. Links are too small to touch and mobile versions are made for much smaller devices.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - jsnell 15y ago

chugger 15y ago

What's the value add other than tight integration with Amazon Cloud, etc. ? is it compelling enough for most users to ditch the Xoom, Touch Pad, Galaxy Tab, etc. over this tablet?

jonknee 15y ago
Most users aren't on any of those, Amazon could have a good quarter and sell more of their tablet than all of those combined. That said, it's going to be half (or even less) the price and have seamless access to a very wide array of content. I don't think they're worried about the Xoom, or the discontinued TouchPad and or the new Galaxy Tab that's illegal to sell in most major markets... They're clearly leveling up against the iPad.

latch 15y ago

I'm just not ready to bet against Apple. I think we're at the point where the only way for anyone to take any significant chunk of profit from Apple's [growing] core business, is for Apple to have a couple significant missteps.

riffraff 15y ago
how do you define significant? As far as I can tell they did have a couple missteps (Apple TV, Ping) already.
- chugger 15y ago
  Apple TV is doing well for a "hobby" compared to Google TV. and Ping's failure is not hurting Apple at all. Amazon however, does not nearly have as much cash and resources as Apple or Google. if Amazon fails in this it can potentially hurt their bottom line.
- latch 15y ago
  None of those missteps are on their core products. I'm talking something like Xbox 360's 33% failure rate (which doesn't even seem to have damaged their brand at all, surprisingly). At this point, their brand is so strong, you'd need something huge...I can't even think of anything besides serious failure rates on iPhones or iPads.
tybris 15y ago
Why? I don't see the precedent. Android phones are overtaking iPhones. Why wouldn't Android tablets?
- latch 15y ago
  humm..it's a bit like saying that your chance of building a successful search engine, without Google first doing something incredibly stupid, are pretty slim. There's a billion precedents. GM, 3dfx, pre-tick-tock Intel, George Lucas.
  - 15y ago

dafarian 15y ago

Apple has 75% of the tablet market, Samsung is gaining quickly as a formidable competitor (specially after the Apple/Samsung European showdown which gave more exposure to the compatibility of Samsung). Amazon might throw a lot of money at it, but my money is on Samsung & Apple battling it out. I think Amazon is doing this because Apple shut them out from their App store.

joshwa 15y ago

Apple sells movies, music and books in order to sell devices. Amazon sells devices in order to sell books, movies and music. This.

philwelch 15y ago
Obvious follow up: then why not let Apple sell the devices and Amazon sell the content?
- notauser 15y ago
  Because Apple want a 30% cut of all content sold via the iPad, which represents a larger margin than Amazon can afford to give away whilst remaining a profitable distributor.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- Someone 15y ago
  Because Apple does not accept that solution? The chunk they want would seriously eat into Amazon's margins.
- bad_user 15y ago
  Big companies would be stupid to rely on anybody else's platform. That's why Google released Android in the first place.
- zach 15y ago
  Why not let Apple sell the devices and Amazon sell the content? Great question. It does seem efficient, what with comparative advantage and all. Because then then that's an experience that's either customer-integrated or concessionary. A customer-integrated experience means bringing your own food to the stadium, maybe from the place across the street. That's what MP3 players were like before the iTunes Music Store. Dedicated experts love customer-integrated experiences, but they're the only ones. A concessionary experience means renting the stadium's food stand to the highest bidder. The highest bidders are either cheapskates or have deeper business motives. The best case is that they just want to expose consumers to some other brand. But when the parties have overlapping interests, things get messy and unstable (i.e. Google on Yahoo, otherwise a great win for users). These types of experiences both have an annoying tendency to suck out loud. Apple's mastery in creating great integrated experiences is one of Steve Jobs' greatest legacies. It's something great creators strive to do and customers are happy to pay for. If Apple were to move away from providing a well-integrated experience, they'd be moving away from not only their key strength but their key value to their users.

acabal 15y ago

I hope that doesn't mean they're abandoning development on their e-ink devices, or relegating them to third-class citizens. The only reason I'd buy a reading device is if staring at it for 2+ hours didn't give me a headache like a backlit tablet does. (And an all-purpose tablet like an iPad still doesn't interest me enough to buy anyway.)

ZeroGravitas 15y ago
Have you tried the various OLED (AMOLED, SAMOLED etc.) devices? When showing black they are effectively off, so white (or green or gray) on black text is relatively soothing. My main reading use case is in bed at night. I have a little booklight for reading actual paper books, but I think I'm waiting for an AMOLED 8" tablet for e-book reading. It works pretty darn well for my phone in low light conditions. (In fact the main competition for an 8" tablet would be one of those giant 5" phones with AMOLED).
- 1880 15y ago
  Sometimes, OLED screens are even worse than your average LCD. For example, the Galaxy S has beautiful colors and the bright of a thousand suns, but it's awful for simple white-on-black text. The glyphs are very irregular and have jaggies. I think it's because of the PenTile arrangement of the pixels: http://pentileblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/pentile-sharp-text1.jpg http://pentileblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/pentile-sh...
  - ZeroGravitas 15y ago
    I have an OLED device, with probably the cheapest version of this technology available, it's using pentile, and I haven't noticed the issue with white text on black though it is occasionally noticeable (though never annoying) to me in other contexts. My device does have a small screen and therefore a relatively high pixel density though. Until the jump to Super AMOLED HD a lot of phones seemed to be putting the same pixel density (and pentile arrangement) on phones with screens an inch bigger e.g. my device is 266ppi vs 233ppi for the Galaxy S. People seem to get a bit religious about pentile. It doesn't make any sense to dismiss (or accept) it without considering all the other parameters. It's designed to make it easier and cheaper to hit certain resolutions and densities. If I could get more pixels or density for the same money then I'd happily take pentile. If there's not much extra gain over not using it, or not much extra cost, then I'd happily leave it out. It also, for whatever technical reason, seems mostly to be associated with OLED technologies, though OLED does not necessarily imply pentile. I think Samsung brands their non-pentile AMOLEDs as SAMOLED plus and they have them either on the market or due very soon in both big phone, massive phone and mid-size tablet varieties. However, OLED does have the one advantage I mentioned about reading in the dark which decides this for me. For that reason alone I personally am waiting for a sufficiently high-density AMOLED tablet for reading purposes. Pentile will be just one factor in weighing up my options, certainly not a deal breaker.

dramaticus3 15y ago

> [The iPad has] set off a revolution in progress about how entertainment and other media are consumed. Is this really true ? I know I'm a bit provincial but I don't know anyone with an iPad and have only ever seen anyone with one TV. I'm not even sure my friend who works in the Apple store has one at home (he's never mentioned it and he's the kind who would). EDIT I got my reply from asking him. It's revolutionised how entertainment and other media are consumed in his house. me: how do you like it ? he: Very much. Lou uses it all the time ... She hasn't used a pc since.

srik 15y ago

"AMAZON PRIME" - thats whats being overlooked. Imagine this. One prime account that would give you netflix like access to all the music, books and movies from amazon's library. Music and Video is pretty much at par with the rest of the iTunes competitors already and once Amazon gathers enough momentum, the book publishers will bow and then Amazon Prime will hold so much value, it wouldn't be sensible to not have one.

77ko 15y ago

The one thing I like about Amazon ebooks is that you can set your country as USA, and than use any credit card to buy American ebooks. I hope that continues with Amazon's tablet and the video and other content they'll be selling, as American digital prices and content selection are cheaper and wider than anywhere else in the world. Of course, the RIAA and MPAA of the world's will be fighting tooth and nail over regional restrictions, I have a feeling Amazon made it easy to bypass regional restrictions because book publishers are technologically challenged and didn't quite realize what happened. Of course, there is always the piratebay for countries which aren't in the G7...

patrickgzill 15y ago

A Kindle DX that can take decent notes/todo lists (maybe with an add-on keyboard) and handle email and web tasks, would be pretty nice.