Amazon Kindle Sells Out

I know Dea­r­Author has been giving read­ers the break­down of the new Amazon Kindle and it’s specs and the supported formats and such. Today I visited Amazon.com and went ahead and saw the video and the pic­tures and lis­tened to bestselling authors exclaim­ing how the Amazon Kindle reads just like paper. I think I can get over the fugly look of the device if it is indeed functional and rea­son­ably priced and a bit smaller. It seems that the fugly look of it isn’t stop­ping buyers since they have sold out of it and won’t have any­more until Dec. 3.

From the gathered pics of the device, this thing looks huge and weighs in at 10.3 ounces which is a lot heav­ier than my Fujitsu Siemens Pocket LOOX 720 (weighs in at 6 0z on the left) but Amazon says that the device is  lighter than a paper­back novel. Amazon also says that it easily fits into one hand - it looks like it takes two to hold it and read it from it. I guess the best part about the Amazon Kindle is that no com­puter is required and wi-​fi access by Whis­per­net™ via Sprint allows you to down­load your books on the go in under a minute. Plus it works out of the box, too and has a long bat­tery life with a 2 hour charge. You can read all of your news­pa­per sub­scrip­tions online and such while taking the train into work. You even have access to Wikipedia. All FREE. 

It is a one hell of an ugly device. If it would have been much more attrac­tive and a bit smaller I would have contemplated buying one. While perus­ing the prod­uct ser­vices, it seems pretty com­pelling to buy one of these things.  I stopped short at the purchase of blog con­tent. Are they for real? Amazon has pur­port­edly gath­ered all the most pop­u­lar blog con­tent and is offer­ing it up for sub­scrip­tions. I didn’t see any of my fellow blog­gers on the list so I wouldn’t be buying. Also, as I’ve said all over blog land, I’m con­tent with my multi-functional device even if it is dis­con­tin­ued. I don’t nec­es­sar­ily need a screen bigger than my own  3.7 inches (but 6 inch screen is like wow, drool) and the e-ink tech­nol­ogy goes right over my head anyway so, I’m not all that interested (so she says with­out read­ing one). I’ll always look at eread­ing devices and read Jane’s assess­ment of them but until that day comes when I am tired of my device, I’ll just con­tinue to look and look and look. For me, the device seems like a good deal with all the ser­vices that it comes with and the fact that it works right out of box. I think I can over­look the unat­trac­tive­ness of it and enjoy the tech­nol­ogy for what it’s worth at $399 (gulp). How­ever, I am leery of con­tin­u­ing to be an early adopter of such tech­nol­ogy when in this case the price could easily drop another hun­dred dol­lars, say, next Christ­mas maybe?

Via Endgaget and Ama​zon.com

Edited to add a cor­rec­tion: I assumed wrong in that Amazon would sup­port or use Mobipocket  format but they don’t. What a f. joke. I’ve been read­ing other reviews from cus­tomers at Amazon and find that the Kindle is indeed over­priced. Most people are saying wait for ver­sion 2.0 but I’ll be wait­ing even longer for some­thing com­pletely dif­fer­ent. You are giving Amazon con­trol over your library and we can’t have that.

Tech­no­rati Tags: Amazon Kindle Wire­less Device, E-Ink Technology