All the major tech/news sites like Wired, C|Net, and Engadget are all a buzz about the new Kindel DX. For those of you who’ve been in the Mountains of Peru for the last two years. The Kindel is a electronic book reader from Amazon.com that has the potential to do to/for books what the iPod did to/for CDs. The newest model is the DX which sports a 9.7″ screen compared to its little brother the Kindel 2′s 6″ screen. Over all the DX is a little smaller then a letter sized sheet of paper and is 0.38″ thick. The DX also adds native support for PDF files and has an auto rotating display. The kicker of course is that the DX will set you back $489 compared to $359 for the standard Kindel. The main market for the DX appears to be college students as the DX is being partnered with major Textbook publishers.
Now a lot of the comments on the various site tend to complain about how the Kindel isn’t the perfect device for one reason or another. So I thought I would cover some of them here. One of the biggest is points that people are making is that for the same price you can buy and cheap laptop. That is true but that cheap laptop isn’t going to weight 19oz, have a battery that will last for several weeks, and be as easy to hold and read as a Kindel. And if I’ve learned one then about tech it is that if you have two devices that can do almost the same thing the one that is smaller and lighter is going to be more expensive.
Another big one is that if you are using it for textbooks that at the end of the class you’ll not be able to sell it back to the bookstore. Yes that is true but if the paper version cost you $85 and you sell it back for $40 the book costs you $45. If the e-book version costs $20 your ahead of the game not counting the upfront costs of the DX, but over the course of a four year college degree at worst it might be a push. The other advantage is that you’ll have all your books that you use over the years of you schooling so it would be a lot easier to go back a brush up on stuff that you learned in an early course that you now need for the advanced class.
The other big grousing point is that the screen is still Black and White. That’s because color e-ink is expensive there is a e-ink device by Fujitsu with a 8″ color screen that will set you back about $1000. Also if you like the refresh rate of the current B&W screens your going to hate the color ones and requires a double refresh to get the final colors. Color displays will get cheaper and in a couple of year I can see a Kindel going for the same price as todays units with a color screen.
Is the KindelDX perfect? No it’s only second gen tech after all (it’s basically a Kindel 2 with a bigger screen) but its better then the first Kindel and things will only get better.
Now if they only would offer a contract deal like a cell phone $150 up front and $15-20 a month for a couple of years I’d be all over it. As it is I’m going to have to wait a couple of years for the price to come down.
Amazon and there proprietary technology that does not even read pdf. Unlike the music industry that evolved through different forms of playback. The text base industry has no really moved from cold hard paperback. They have their work cut out.
Well the new DX does read PDF naively.