Posts Tagged: kindle

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13
Apr 10

Eat this, Kindle!

The iPad has only been out for a few days, and personally I’m still not sure why I’d want one (although, having a trip to NYC planned in the next weeks might bring unforseen opportunity…).

This short video tells me we ain’t seen nothing yet – blew my socks off!

I can only imagine what other creative things developers might come up with. Fantastic.

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4
Nov 09

Mobile OS winners: iPhone, Palm WebOS, Android

At least that’s what Aral Balkan thinks, and I’m tempted to agree.

greenshot_2009-11-03_23-10-03

“WTF?” I hear you say – what about all those years of Symbian and Windows Mobile dominating the market?

Well, these are great operating systems, and they deserve a lot of credit. But from *today’s* perspective, they bet on the wrong horse.

What makes the iPhone, WebOS and Android different are three main things:

  • As stupid as it sounds, the fact that you could only buy the phones with a data plan finally proved the point that connected devices are far more usable as non-connected devices. Yes, you could use all those other smartphones online as well, but people only seriously started doing this (in numbers) when they were ‘forced’ to buy proper data plans.
  • Having many more users with ONLINE smartphones paved the way to app stores and mobile consumption of online services. They also had proper browsers that you could really use on the go for the first time (don’t give me Opera Mobile now – please….).
  • The three mobile operating systems above were designed with ONLINE in mind, and they only make sense in online scenarios. This point is made very well every time I leave the country and can not afford the rip-off data roaming rates, which turns my great iPhone 3GS into a quite bulky iPod that can’t even do GPS without data.

Now the next step is affordable data roaming. I’m pretty sure this will happen over the next few years.

The first step towards this may be – strangely enough – that Amazon started selling the Kindle (US version) in the rest of the world. I heard someone from the US say yesterday that he’d be buying an international Kindle in the US (!) to use it on international trips.

If that kind of madness doesn’t trigger innovation nothing will.

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7
Oct 09

Amazon Kindle available in germany

Wow, this was a surprise this morning:

greenshot_2009-10-07_09-17-02

Of course this is not your standard german product:

  • you have to order at Amazon.com, which will be a hurdle for many consumers (language, credit card required etc.). On the other hand, right now this is something only geeks will order, anyway
  • Taxes on import
  • US keyboard
  • US charger

What’s more interesting, though, is how the Kindle will work in germany. It seems the SIM card to access the mobile network is built-in, so they will most likely have done a roaming agreement with a german mobile operator. Any idea who this is? This will determine the availability of 3G service.

Plus, what about the content? Right now, the available content is US focussed (magazines, newspapers etc.). In the past, electronic versions of US books could not easily be sold in germany, as the german publishers saw their distribution rights violated. Will this circumvent the issue? Will publishers sue? Will competitors (Sony) sue?

What about my Amazon account – right now, even though I can order from the US, there are minor differences in what I can or can’t do, and my address data will be replicated to the US system with weird changes (we don’t have states, and the umlauts will be translated into strange characters).
Will I suddenly be able to get stuff through the kindle that I would be stopped from ordering otherwise?

So, not only will we get a cool gadget, but this is much more interesting DRM and content wise. This might be the start of quite some controversy, hope Amazon will not have to pull books again ;)