I thought the same thing. I thought it was one of the eMachines but there was a period during the late 90’s where you had three or four different companies offering a “free computer” which was ad-supported and signed up for a couple years to some dial-up ISP. That was back when, to make something sound “techie”, you called it “eThingie” instead of “iThingie”.
As I recall, it had a banner ad on the top of the screen. It may have been movable but it was persistent.
The Silk browser on the new Kindle Fire is kind of interesting. Amazon is basically using their cloud service to do all the heavy lifting for the browser and then (more or less) ships the rendered page to the tablet. So the tablet can browse very quickly even with minimal local hardware. The downside is that if that these things sell like hotcakes, Amazon has to devote a whole bunch of servers to rendering and caching web pages for people.
I’m not sure how the economics of this works out, but I’d be interested in finding out just how much Amazon is looking over your shoulder while browsing in return for that service.
I placed a pre-order of the Kindle Fire. I’m thinking of giving it to my brother for Christmas.
My kids gave me a Sony Reader last year for Christmas. I wasn’t specific, I just wanted an eReader, and my SIL made the selection.
After using the Reader, I was MEGA disappointed in the horrendous price of ebooks. I still buy PBs and HBs cheaper than I can buy an ebook. I’ll just be patient.
The biggest savings is with the newspapers and magazines. Unfortunately, Sony doesn’t offer the huge selection that Amazon has for the Kindle, so I might get a Kindle just for periodicals.
Am I right in assuming periodicals do better on the larger screen?
~VOW
Just curious, why do you need a physical keyboard on an e-reader? Surfing the internet?
What’s the advantage of a touch screen? Aside from this:
It’s useful if you’re reading nonfiction, and want to be able to scrawl notes in the “margins” as with a dead-tree book.
I use it occasionally to do a keyword search on the book.
If the ads are like they used to be, I would actually prefer the ad-supported version, because all I’ve seen are basically special deals at Amazon. Rather than “Drink coke!”, you get "Want 20% off laptops? Use code AJ31824KQ. I actually saved $75 off a camera purchased on amazon with one of those promo codes.
Not sure if it changed or will change, but the ad-supported stuff is actually kind of cool.
Yep. I use it to check my email, my facebook, look up directions, etc. In some ways - especially for maps - I find it far better than smartphone apps, because of the screen size, being able to read it in bright sunlight, and because it doesn’t go away if you lose a connection.
It means that, since I also now have a good camera, I don’t really need a smartphone (and this is from a previous smartphone fan). I can check the stuff I really need to check on my kindle and have no contract and never pay anything extra at all. All my phone now needs to do is be a phone. I have browsed and posted on messageboards from it too, and found it easier than on a really good phone because of the screen size and proper keys.
Cataloguing my stuff also used the keyboard, but I presume there’s some other way to do that if there’s no keyboard and no touchpad.
If you’re using it only as an e-reader then no keyboard would be fine.
Yeah, I got my Kindle before the “special offers” version came out, and I actually envy the people who get the ads.
Before someone stole mine I could play scrabble on it with the keyboard. There were a couple other word type game, but scrabble worked really really well.
The ads I notice are of stuff I’d be interested in anyway. They’re all of books and TV series, not ‘ur p3ni£ can b£ b1 ggR!’
The price for a lot of books has gone up, but Amazon has also been running TONS of sales. At least twice in the past few months they’ve ran sales where they price hundreds of books at $5 or under. No, they’re not the greatest new releases or anything like that, but I found at least a few I was interested in. And at $2/each (or whatever they were), I didn’t mind buying them even if it turned out I didn’t like them.
And their newest thing is “Kindle Daily Deals” which is getting far too much of my cash. In the past week, I’ve bought:
Farewell: The Greatest Spy Story of the Twentieth Century $0.99
Page from a Tennessee Journal $1.99
Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 $1.49
And that’s just since 1 week ago today. I’m a sucker for cheap books.
Amazon also offers a ton of free books for the Kindle. A lot of them are from new authors or classics like HG Wells, which have been great for my home schooled son’s Lit studies.
I don’t have the actual device, but I have a Kindle reader on my laptop. I may have to break down and get one now that the price has dropped significantly.
How does that work? I was under the impression that the screen could only be refreshed one whole page at a time (doing the inverted colors every time). Does that happen for every letter you type or does it only refresh that area of the screen?
That sounds really appealing, and I can now understand why they didn’t put 3G in the Kindle Fire…
You just type it in and then enter it. It doesn’t refresh for every letter, only when you ask it to refresh. You do have to ask it to refresh, by going to the right bit, but that’s easy.
Just popping in with my opinions. I’ve had a Kindle 2 for a while now.
But yeah, I love the Kindle, and wholeheartedly recommend it. The $79 Kindle looks great, unless you want to wait for the touch version at $99.
Wouldn’t the advertizing version use up a lot more battery, since it would be changing pages even when the kindle was not in use?
I mean, I’m thrilled about the cost, but I just don’t get how adding ads doesn’t significantly hurt the experience, even if you don’t ever actually look at them.
I have heard that the battery life is worse with ads, but my Kindle still lasts two weeks of frequent reading and occasional internet usage. It changes pages extremely infrequently - every few days.