I rarely see technology that truly excites me these days – but Amazon with their Kindle Fire did just that. I’d always liked the Apple iPad but the $600+ price has always put me off – and black and white readers which ONLY allow you to read and have no ability to do anything else seem like a waste of technology.
When HP dumped their touchpad onto the market at $100 I was one of those people who thought “hey for that money I’ll buy it and THEN work out what I can use it for”… regardless of whether there was any new software being written for it. This simply because having the ability to surf the web on something that was portable and easier to read than an iphone just sounded cool.
Unfortunately like 1000’s of others I missed out on that particular opportunity, but I am wondering now if that was actually a lucky break since Amazon now has the Kindle Fire.
At $199 this is double the impulse-buy that the touchpads were being sold at, but with some distinct advantages:
a company that looks like they actively WANT to support this form factor
a mass of media ready for consumption
a size and weight that means you don’t need 2 hands to hold it when you ARE reading
and cloud storage which means that you aren’t restricted by the amount of memory in the device.
I’m now wondering how I can persuade Sarah to let me have one for Christmas!
