Maybe it got a better deal than that, since the device is designed more for a download-and-read experience than an always-on experience. Even at $10 a month per Kindle, Amazon would need to sell a dozen books just to recoup its wireless network costs. Obviously, Amazon was able to negotiate a much lower price. My Sprint EVDO data plan costs $60 a month. This part really works well.īut Amazon must be taking a big hit up front on this. So everything you buy or subscribe to just gets downloaded seamlessly.
#KINDLE FIRST READS FREE#
The high-speed wireless data access comes free with the device. Amazon bought EVDO data access wholesale from Sprint and is re-marketing it with the Kindle as Whispernet. You can shop for Amazon books, or electronic newspaper, magazine, and blog subscriptions, right from the device, which comes with a built-in Sprint EVDO card. What the device does well is provide a seamless purchasing and electronic reading experience. Although this is primarily a reading device, you can surf the Web and write notes or comments, so you will be typing at times. As far as I am concerned, I shouldn’t be able to type faster than any device can register my keystrokes. Too long here being milliseconds, but the lag time is still noticeable. You have to wait too long to see the letters you type appear on the screen. The keyboard does not feel fast enough for me in terms of responding to my fingers. And you cannot reprogram them like soft keys on a cell phone of other device. Also, the device has two of those “Next Page” buttons, one on the left and one on the right, which seems redundant. To do that you have to hit the “Next Page or “Previous Page” buttons, which I find slightly annoying (and slower than just scrolling would have been). At first, I thought it would work like the right-hand navigation scroll bar in a browser, but it does not actually let you scroll through a page. The scroll wheel controls a digital bar that moves up and down the right side of the screen. It does not have a regular computer display, but a black-and-white E-Ink screen. The screen is amazingly readable, as long as you have a light source (just like with a regular book). The digital rights management on the device does not allow it to be transfered. And forget ever loaning an electronic book to anyone who does not share your Amazon account. You can make your own comments on a book or highlight parts of it, but it is not terribly easy to share those notations with others. Not that the two are mutually exclusive, but the device is more concerned with improving the experience of reading a book than it is with porting over many of the things online readers already take for granted. I think it is the latter (see Bezos’ comments in previous post). I cannot tell if it is supposed to appeal to technophiles or bibliophiles. The Kindle does take some getting used to. The Kindle is essentially an iPod for books, with Amazon’s online book store taking on the role of iTunes. The large, gray panel on the back covering the battery and SD-card memory slot is rubberized and engraved with letters and symbols from different alphabets throughout the ages, a subtle reference to the tablets that held the first written words.Įverything else (other than the text on the screen) is white, which is supposed to help make the device “disappear” so that the reader does not get distracted by anything other than the words on the screen, but it seems like a nod to the original white iPod. It is much lighter than a book and comfortable to hold. A mod, over-sized, calculator from the 1970s comes to mind. It is not as clunky as the FCC picture made it out to be, but it still has an odd retro feel. I played around with mine while I was waiting to interview Jeff Bezos. Everyone at Amazon’s Kindle press conference (which I liveblogged earlier today) received one of the electronic book readers.