{"id":1940,"date":"2007-11-19T17:01:49","date_gmt":"2007-11-19T22:01:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/2007\/11\/19\/kindle-colour-me-still-unconvinced\/"},"modified":"2007-11-19T17:01:49","modified_gmt":"2007-11-19T22:01:49","slug":"kindle-colour-me-still-unconvinced","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2007\/11\/19\/kindle-colour-me-still-unconvinced\/","title":{"rendered":"Kindle: Colour me still unconvinced"},"content":{"rendered":"

So Amazon has launched the Kindle, its e-book reader, with a press release<\/a> and an event with CEO Jeff Bezos, which TechCrunch is live-blogging<\/a>. Several sites have hands-on details, including Engadget<\/a> (which I would be happy to pay for, Ryan, just not via a monthly fee).<\/p>\n

If anything, my skepticism about the Kindle — some of which I allowed to escape in this post yesterday<\/a> about the paying for blogs option — has increased. And not just because it looks (as someone said<\/a>) like a giant version of a Handspring PDA from 1997, although I think that’s going to reduce the demand more than Amazon might like to think.<\/p>\n

The thing that I’m really torn about is the wireless connectability. On the one hand, it’s great to have a device that can download books (although it reportedly takes a while), and it’s nice that Amazon has built that into the price. But then you have to pay to access the RSS feeds of blogs, which makes no sense — especially if, as Boing Boing notes<\/a>, you can go to the blog directly with the built-in “experimental” browser. At this point, I feel compelled to use the phrase “WTF?” again.<\/p>\n

The wireless also isn’t Wi-Fi, but a specially configured version of EVDO, so you can’t do all kinds of things with it. In other words, the wireless connection is sort of crippled, just as a whole series of other things about the device are crippled — and that would include the inability to put certain kinds of content on there because of the proprietary or restricted formats that Amazon is using. <\/p>\n

I’m with Rex Hammock on this one<\/a>: I would much rather have a larger version of the iPod Touch (assuming we could hack it, of course). Saul Hansell thinks we might get<\/a> something like that in the future. Fred Wilson — who was approached about including his blog on the Kindle — says he thinks the whole idea of a dedicated e-book reader is ridiculous<\/a>, and Kevin Kelly says he sees e-books as just one possible app on the Cloudbook of the future<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So Amazon has launched the Kindle, its e-book reader, with a press release and an event with CEO Jeff Bezos, which TechCrunch is live-blogging. Several sites have hands-on details, including Engadget (which I would be happy to pay for, Ryan, just not via a monthly fee). If anything, my skepticism about the Kindle — some … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Kindle: Colour me still unconvinced”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1940","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1940","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1940"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1940\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1940"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1940"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1940"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}