"Nothing I'd buy a new one for." Exactly my thought. I'll continue to use (and love) my Kindle Keyboard everyday.
This makes me worry about Amazon's future in the ereader space. The Touch is gone, replaced with this for $139 sans offers. The capable Kobo Touch and Nook Touch are $99.
$40 for a light and whiter background? I'll continue to use my $4.50 clip-on light, thanks.
Kindles aren't at the head of the price versus performance curve anymore.
They're still at the head of the price curve if you look at the price that matters: $69. you don't really need a touch screen, a glow light, and the ads are not a big deal. Kindle is still the cheapest real player in the e-reader market.
I probably won't be upgrading from my 3rd-gen kindle either, but somehow i doubt amazon cares. I'm sure they make more off of book purchases from 3-year-old kindles than they do from the sale of new hardware. They want to sell kindles to as many people as they can, but once you've got a kindle all they need you to do is keep buying content.
I rarely do searches on my Kindle 4, and when I do there's a not-as-cumbersome-as-you'd-think-but-pretty-cumbersome-anyway keyboard that you can use. In exchange, I get a smaller, lighter Kindle that's easier to pack around.
That said, the physical page-turn buttons are the best part. Without those, I'd never use the thing.
Maybe it's just me, but there are circumstances when I prefer a good index to a text search. If a term is informally introduced and used a couple of times in the few pages before it's defined, for example, I usually want the formal definition, and I can just remember that that's the second index entry rather than the first rather than Ctrl-G-ing my way through a bunch of uses.
Jeff Bezos stated this explicitly during the presentation - Amazon wants to make money when you use the device, not when you buy it. So they sell the Kindles at a very aggressive price in order to get you into the Amazon ecosystem. If you're already there, they're not going to make much, if anything, if you upgrade.
Which is why it's odd that they seem to abandon their older devices the moment new hardware is released. You can't report passages with errors in them on the KK for instance, because that feature only exists on the Kindle4 devices.
It's possible that the new software couldn't be ported to the older hardware of course, and keeping multiple lines of software current takes more developer resources, but if Amazon doesn't want people to upgrade, then turning their hardware into abandonware seems like it's a counterproductive move.
Amazon makes a virtue internally of doing everything 'on a shoestring' supposedly, this is probably just an external reflection of that I guess.
Yeah, this is a good point. It's long seemed to me the incentive for Android manufacturers is not to provide retroactive upgrades (and only helpful for Apple insofar as it is a competitive selling point).
Amazon seems the opposite; good software updates would make your old device feel new (just optimize speed and bugfixes, if nothing else). That would prevent people from upgrading to such "cheap" new models.
On the other hand maybe they expect to sell an order of magnitude more devices each generation. Also, depending whether the old devices end up in desk drawers or new users' hands it might all work out.
They've still pretty much abandoned the K2 & DX users, but perhaps the userbase for those is so small it isn't worth supporting them: it would probably be cheaper to just send them all new Kindles, but I doubt Amazon will do that...
$40 for a light, and better contrast, and better resolution. 800×600 was getting pretty long in the tooth; cramming 1024×768 into the same space may not sound like much, but I'm looking forward to the higher pixel density for sure.
And faster page turn speed. None of it is worth it for what Amazon is trying to do with books: exclusivity deals etc. are going to turn books into cable tv and Amazon is leading the charge.
This makes me worry about Amazon's future in the ereader space. The Touch is gone, replaced with this for $139 sans offers. The capable Kobo Touch and Nook Touch are $99.
$40 for a light and whiter background? I'll continue to use my $4.50 clip-on light, thanks.
Kindles aren't at the head of the price versus performance curve anymore.