Don't like my Kindle!

asbokid

S0litaire wrote: »

The Lowest Amazon could "Sell" a kindle for is around the £80 mark for the Wi-Fi only model. They have stated this on a number of occasions in press releases.

And you believe this because?.... Be assured that Amazon is telling a huge porky pie about Kindle production costs.

The Kindle is a low-quality embedded device with a 1970s display panel. The whole device costs well under $10 to manufacture in the volumes involved. It's a piece of trash that is hyped through huge amounts of marketing.

Much of the Kindle software has been "borrowed" by Amazon from the Open Source Software community. The operating system of the Kindle is Linux, developed and released under the GPL by Russell King et al from ARM Linux in Cambridge, UK. The userspace binaries are also Open Source and cost Amazon absolutely nothing in licensing costs. For more info on the cost-free software in the Kindle, see the recent article by Glyn Moody, tech correspondent to the Guardian newspaper.

The ARM9 processor used in the Kindle is a low spec device, again it was developed in Cambridge and sold under licence for mass production in the Far East. There's a few GB of flash RAM, ARM Linux burnt to ROM, the ubiquitous Qualcomm UMTS chipset for 3G access, cheapo casing and that nasty EPD panel..

All in all, there's nothing inside the Kindle that justifies its ridiculous price. The Kindle is a $10 device that has very limited application and appeal. But if Amazon and its billion buck marketing campaign has persuaded you otherwise... then who are we to question?!

Fifer

asbokid wrote: »

The entire Kindle is a junk device. Its key technology - its electrophoretic display - is an ugly relic of the 1970s.

Electrophoresis is the kind of technology that got smelly, bearded lecturers from the Open University sexually aroused and foaming at the mouth at 3.30am on BBC2. Disgusting.

As to an indication of the fabrication cost of the Kindle's EPD, just look at the technologies involved in the hideous thing.. Its manufacture involves a handful of mass-produced polymer layers glued together and printed off by the metre and chopped down to size with a guillotine cutter.

The Kindle display is about as sexy and innovative as the plastic membrane you find inside the lowest quality of PC keyboard. And how much does that membrane cost to produce? Evidently no more than a few pence, since the keyboard itself only costs a quid or two.

Sorry, I think you misunderstood. I was looking for evidence of your claimed minuscule production cost for e-paper displays.

asbokid

BunShopBandit wrote: »

To be charitable, I can understand people who have made an embarrassing mistake in buying one of these relatively crippled devices - and why they try to big it up. Nobody wants to be the loner with the rubbish toy

There's an embarrassing sheep-like psychology to Kindlemania.. it's a mindless herd instinct we are witnessing. This is the madness of crowds! This is a prime example of the corporate abuse of the consumer: a marketing insult to our soggy critical faculties. This is real life retail idiocy. Every bit as cringe-worthy as the fairytale of The Emperor's New Clothes. You can't help feeling a sense of total despair that otherwise sane people are parting with hard-earned cash for a pile of obsolete junk.

It leaves you wondering if any economic good would ever come of the Kindle? I can't see it myself. Let's hope the damn things never take off to any degree. Amazon has an utterly fascist DRM agenda for the Kindle. It hopes to use the device to permanently gouge a deep hole in our pockets. The Kindle would spell very bad news for the book-reading general public. The Nazi-esque mindset of Amazon is salivating at the thought of forever shackling our book-buying to this hideous platform. The Amazon gameplan is quite ghastly. This revolting corporation plans to suck the very life-blood from both readers and authors alike.

That is the wet dream of Amazon and its billionaire scrooge founder, Jeff Bezos, every bit the Bilderberg poster boy. However, in the dueness of time, consumer sanity will prevail. The Kindle device is gaining wide recognition as an expensive fleeting folly. The Kindle is a 21st century challenger to the widely ridiculed Sinclair C5 tricycle. Like the C5, the Kindle is a grossly overpriced, deeply flawed device that is heavily limited by its application. And the limitations of the Kindle will ensure that it too will never attain ubiquity. At least, not in its current form and at its currently absurd consumer cost.

The Kindle is a $10 device and by the overwhelming reluctance of the public to buy into Kindlemania, despite the media hype, it seems that most of us already know that.

asbokid

BunShopBandit wrote: »

It was nearly 10 years ago I had a Palm that I could read eBooks on, and to be honest that device had more features than a basic Kindle, and only cost £30.

Yes! And the saddest thing is that the Kindle is so much more limited than the Palm.

Technologically, the Kindle should be compared to the digital photo frame (DPF)

Just US$12 will buy you an embedded device with the following features...

1) 7-inch TFT display with 4 LED lights
2) Picture resolution:480*234 px
3) Brightness: 350cd/m2
4) Solution: CheerTek 　　　　
5) Photo by hard decoding, support for up to 1200 pixel images
6) Video: support MPEG1 (VCD), MPEG2 (DVD), MPEG4 (AVI) and Xvid formats
7) Audio : Support MP3, WMA format playback
8) Play photo,set slideshow,zoom in&out,rotate,
9) 16:9/4:3 play mode 　　　
10) Support CF card and 3 in 1 card (SD / MMC / MS)
11) Support AV output funtion
12) Clock / alarm clock / calendar / automatic timer switch
13) Remote control function
14) Build-in stereo speaker
15) Supports English, Chinese, Japanese, French, German, Italian, Russian and Spanish

There is one major difference between the digital photo frame and the Kindle....the Kindle has a very low-cost screen that costs just pennies to manufacture. And it is that budget screen which renders the Kindle useless for anything other than static image display.

Fifer

asbokid wrote: »

The Kindle is a $10 device

Evidence please.

asbokid

Fifer wrote: »

Evidence please.

No surprise, the little people aren't given an itemised costing for every component in the Kindle.

Only Foxconn, the controversial Taiwanese manufacturer of the Kindle, will hold that commercially-sensitive information, and it won't be in a hurry to reveal it.

However, just a cursory examination of the guts of a Kindle tells us that its production cost is close to $10.

Technologically, the Kindle is in the same league as the LCD digital photo frame that Chinese outlets are flogging on ebay for $10.

In fact, the $10 digital photo frame is superior to the Kindle. With its more expensive TFT LCD screen, the digital photo frame can play motion video.

Fifer

asbokid wrote: »

. With its more expensive TFT LCD screen, the digital photo frame can play motion video.

Against every interet and industry source that I'm aware of, you continue to claim that epaper screens are cheap. Evidence please.

Syman

The value of any thing is determined by what someone is prepared to pay. the price was acceptable, i was prepared to pay, so i paid it.

It does what i want, when i want how i want.

There are cheaper books and books that are not available, if i want that particular book i will buy it. (it is not meant to replace paper, just make the day to day reading more convenient.


in short, all the rhetoric about who is ripping who off is a bit of a glib point.

I am pretty sure my car did not cost the £10,000 i paid for it to manufacture. But like the kindle i was prepared to pay it.

Similarly, the high cost of football shirts against the manufacturing cost. blows the percentage of profit allegedly made by amazon out of the water.

Be_Happy

Well, it's growing on me. I took it on holiday and liked the convenience. Still reading mostly the free books as I find the cost of the bought e-books is very close to the paper books and they have the 'pass on' value.

One problem I've found is that when I tell OH a book has been good and he wants to read it, I have to hand over the Kindle (he doesn't have one) and then have to wait before I can read another book. And, no, we're not buying another one!

One free book I did read on holiday was The Last Legion, a collection of short stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. I had never heard of this book before and enjoyed it, so I am discovering new books to read.

Fifer

Be_Happy wrote: »

One problem I've found is that when I tell OH a book has been good and he wants to read it, I have to hand over the Kindle (he doesn't have one) and then have to wait before I can read another book. And, no, we're not buying another one!

Not quite the same, but couldn't they use the Kindle app on a PC, laptop or smartphone for an occasional read??