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Amazon’s Kindle 2 Will Debut Feb. 9
- keltecp11 18y agoThis thing is becoming quite powerful... However, I expect the economy will hit their sales hard.
- josefresco 18y agoSomehow I trust that Amazon will know how to navigate these waters. They're one of the few retailers that have not seen a major drop in profits.
- TweedHeads 18y agoYears ago, when laptops where over $1000, an ebook reader for under $299 was a good idea. Netbooks changed the game...
- kqr2 18y agoI have a laptop and a kindle and much prefer the kindle for reading. The display is more paper like and can be read in bright day light. Also, battery life is superior. I only need to charge it maybe once a week. My main problem with the kindle is that it can't read pdfs natively.
- ryanwaggoner 18y agoDo you regularly read full-length novels on your laptop?
- jerf 18y agoNot infrequently. There's a lot of "personal taste" involved in this domain. Some people can't seem to stomach reading for a long time on anything short of a Kindle, whereas I used to read Project Gutenberg books on my 160x160px monochrome Palm Pilot with reasonable comfort. I understand the personal taste in general but have always been surprised by programmer's problems with electronic displays. Reading a novel is way easier than reading code. If you can handle reading code, surely you can deal with a novel... but again, personal taste.
- jodrellblank 18y agoYou think widely available eInk displays will bring improvements in code?
- jerf 18y agoThat's the exact opposite of what I think. If you can read code on a monitor, surely you can read a novel. (Personal taste! Personal taste! Don't flame me!)
- jodrellblank 18y agoYes I see that - but if people who don't want to read a novel on screen, yet who code at the moment, could use a new display that they would read a novel on happily - would that also bring any improvements to their coding?
- delackner 18y agoClearly you are all missing the insight here: where are our widescreen e-ink displays for writing code? Who needs color? Just give me paper-like readability and bold and italic.
- glymor 18y agowhere are our e-ink displays for writing code They take too long to refresh.
- delackner 18y agoYou're so right. I just finally looked at a youtube video of the display tech in the new kindle (the "broadstreet" version of e-ink) and it is indeed far slower than is necessary even for simple text editing.
- jerf 18y agoAh, I see, you seriously meant that as a question, not a comment. Sorry. I think I'd have to defer to a scientific study. I tend to doubt it, though; just as "typing speed" is rarely the coding impediment, I doubt "screen quality" is very much anymore. (Though it sure was in the bad old 640x480 days...)
- misterbwong 18y agoUpped because I am facing this exact perdicament. I like the idea of having a "take anywhere" device that actually performs well as a book substitute. But, I am also tempted by the netbooks because they can perform this same function (albeit, poorly) and do so much more for the same price. I guess it comes down to where your priorities lie.
- rbanffy 18y agoI just want it to be GSM-friendly and to sell for less than US$ 100. For the $100 to $500 range, I can use a full-featured entry-level notebook or a cheaper, lighter netbook. The Kindle has a big problem then.
- dimitar 18y agoI would like a 100$ e-book reader with an electronic paper display and pdf support, with no extra features, please.
- mechanical_fish 18y agoThat's fine, but you'll probably have to wait until the folks who are willing to pay $360 are done buying. Given that Amazon allowed their hit product to go out of stock over Christmas, methinks the supply of eInk isn't quite enough to meet the demand at $360, let alone $100.
- simon_kun 18y agohttp://www.foxitsoftware.com/ebook/ http://www.foxitsoftware.com/ebook/ Not the right price, but the PDF support is build right in. alt.binaries.e-book.technical will finally realise its promise.
- blasdel 18y agoNot supporting SDHC cards (the 4gb limit) in 2009 is pretty bizzare, and makes the device look quite suspect to me.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- glymor 18y agoEvery reader but the Kindle supports PDF and most do it better than the Foxit while actually existing. Look at the video here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdPLe8TU57U http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdPLe8TU57U he puts it into landscape mode (the only semi-readable mode on small screened readers) and it doesn't fit to width or even centre.
- sireat 18y agoI've been debating putting in a deposit on the foxit, since it seems to be the simplest and most affordable. But since it is coming from a software company(albeit one with a good reputation) it is a gamble. Another idea worth considering is making Eink based reader yourself. However, a development kit from E-ink is "only" $3,000, at that price one might as well buy all the Eink based readers on the market and dissasemble them.
- DanHulton 18y agoI always imagined this thing similar to consoles - you sell it at break-even (or even at a loss) to encourage the purches of books over its service. Lord knows that if all it took was a quick bit of navigation on the Kindle itself to buy any book at Amazon, I'd have a full Kindle and an empty wallet.
- indigoviolet 18y agothat is actually exactly how the kindle works. not any book, but many books.
- superkarn 18y agoExcept the Kindle's entry price is still quite high (at least for me).
- matthewking 18y agoWe haven't even got version 1 in the UK yet!
- anuraggoel 18y agoHopefully Amazon made changes to their final design based on feedback on the Boy Genius Report 'leak': http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2008/10/03/amazon-kindle-2-ebooks-its-way-to-bgr/ http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2008/10/03/amazon-kindle-2-eb... "...the battery does not look to be user-accessible, and there’s no more SD card slot..."
- JoelSutherland 18y agothe new device corrects some of the design flaws of the first model, adding round buttons instead of those strange angular ones, and smaller side buttons to avoid accidental page turns. I received a Kindle as a gift and at first I hated the buttons. Now having read a dozen books or so, I think they are genius. I am sure they are making this change to satisfy the initial-reaction reviewers. It can be a little to easy to accidentally press the side buttons on the original, something that happens to me a couple of times per book. This is greatly outweighed by the thought that went into them. It is really easy to press the buttons with an elbow, pillow or even your nose when need be. It makes reading a book a one- or no-hand operation. Behind the screen, I would put the weird and unique buttons on the kindle as a top feature.
- palish 18y agoAll buttons should be eradicated. I can't wait for the day someone creates an affordable brain-to-computer interface. (And one that doesn't require you to drill holes in your head.) Man, that was a huge tangent. Anyway...
- Goronmon 18y agoI, for one, hope that "leaked" design isn't the actual redesign since judging by the pictures I liked the original better. The shape, while weird at first, works well for something you can hold easily in one hand. The large buttons allow you to hold it in much more varying positions without having to worry about have a specific finger rested in a specific place on the device to perform an action you are going to be doing quite often. Plus, the new one looks quite a bit larger.
- AndrewWarner 18y agoKindle should be software, not hardware. And it should run on as many different devices as possible--including my mobile phone, on which I read the newspaper and HN every day.
- DocSavage 18y agoI'm wondering when Amazon will bundle Audible's digital audiobook tech into the Kindle. Amazon acquired Audible last year and for some markets, like children's books, it's a no-brainer to sync narration with the written word.