i just ordered my amazon kindle, it should arrive tomorrow! it sure is ugly as hell, but it has electronic ink, so i am really curious to see it. i hope it has the newer e-ink vizplex imaging film and not the old version that was used for sony's PRS-500. i don't have a PRS-505 (which uses vizplex), but my (ridiculously useless) irex iliad has vizplex and it really is much better than the older generation e-ink.
according to the product page, there does not seem to be a browser on it, which is disappointing, but in a way i would have been really surprised to see a full-fledged browser on an e-ink device. PDF also does not seem to be supported, which is bad.
but i can subscribe to FAZ now, which is cute (well, i should wait until i see the price...), and a number of other newspapers and magazines are available as well.
i am wondering whether they left any channel open through which i can compile and send my own content to the device, but i don't think so. for starters, amazon pays for the wireless connection (the kindle uses EVDO, which uses a cell phone network, but kindle users don't have to pay for it), so if they allowed open content on the device, they would pay for the bandwidth that people use for content that is not paid for. so i don't think they will allow any open content, apart from the small set of formats that they mention on the product page (DOC, JPG, GIF, PNG, BMP).
anyway, i am looking forward to playing around with the kindle, and of course paying a second time for all the books which i already bought for my sony PRS-500; these are the joys of DRM-crippled e-books...
I'm thinking about getting one too... it would be great if you could post your thoughts when you've played with it enough. I'm really interested in if I could just throw a bunch of PDFs (acaemic papers) and have plenty to keep me busy.
Posted by: joe | Tuesday, November 20, 2007 at 07:40
doesn't support PDF?!?!?!?!
Posted by: joe | Tuesday, November 20, 2007 at 07:46
no kindle yet, but some email from amazon, a pointer to my kindle account on their web site, and pricing info for magazines and newspapers. for some reason, the newspapers are much more expensive than the magazines.
Frankfurter Allgemeine: $14.99 / month
Washington Post: $9.99 / month
Wall Street Journal: $9.99 / month
New York Times: $13.99 / month
San Francisco Chronicle: $5.99 / month
Time: $1.49 / month
Atlantic Monthly: $1.25 / month
and of course you also pay for blogs... so as i suspected, there is no free content on the kindle. even when you are sending yourself email attachments (which uselessly enough are restricted to word documents and images) you are being charged for each email.
Posted by: dret | Tuesday, November 20, 2007 at 11:27