I watched the unveiling of Amazon’s latest Kindle with great anticipation. It ended with great disappointment and an opportunity for APPLE to own another category of personal electronics.
As a voracious reader, I’ve been watching the Kindle with hungry eyes. I’m not reluctant to spend $10 per month for newspapers or $10 for e-versions of recent titles. It’s the cost of the device itself (a meaty $359) that causes me to choke. Even with Today’s official release of Kindle 2, the price remains too high and the functionality is still too low.
Yes, the new Kindle is smaller, more attractive, and more powerful than its predecessor — but it’s still an e-book reader that only supports a subset of document types. It’s not yet the universal document and net content reader that it needs to be.
The ideal device for me would be capable of all the heavy lifting a reader needs: books, newspapers, blogs, rss feeds, email, and any text document. It would be capable of displaying sheet music (virtual music stand capabilities). And, it would have an insanely long battery life as the tradeoff for its reduced functionality when compared to a netbook (yes, I said ‘netbook’) computer. It doesn’t need to support color. It doesn’t need a robust keyboard.
The physical design of the Kindle remains klunky for its price tag. At $359, it should support a touchscreen in favor of the integrated keyboard.
On the bright side, Kindle remains a good ‘proof of concept.’ It’s only a matter of time until a netbook/document reader hybrid is introduced by a company such as Apple that can leverage the demand for a reading-centered device and define a new product category.
About Troy Janisch
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