Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Speaking of Christmas! New Kindles and "Kindle Fire"

Wow. In the last hour, Amazon announced a bunch of new products.

I have a Kindle, which I got for my seminary graduation. It turned the mountain range of books beside my bed into a couple of small hills and a thin device which holds the rest of the range. I love that it's not backlit, and thus is easier on my eyes after a day of starting at computer screens. I love that when I'm traveling overseas and need another book I can, for instance, walk past the six English paperbacks which cost 23 bucks apiece and download something I actually want to read for the flight home. I can download a lot of books for free (right now I'm reading "A Christmas Carol"... don't tell my wife, she doesn't like me starting the Christmas celebrations too early).

But this morning Amazon announced a new Kindle touch, which means you'll be able to turn pages by tapping the screen, I suppose, which would be nice. AND, if you 
don't care about the touch aspect, you can get a "regular old Kindle" for for 79 bucks! The touch version is for 99 bucks or with 3G  for 149.


The other big news is that Amazon is releasing an iPad competitor, the big difference apparently being (1) the price and (2) that Amazon thinks storing things on your computer is lame, so all your movies, books, and music will be primarily stored "on the cloud" which for all you non-tech people out there I will explain this simply: It's magic. Anyway, it's called the Amazon Flame Kindle Fire  (I guess "Amazon Flame" sounds a little too mythological) and it's only going to cost $199, which is a pretty big difference from the iPad. It's going to have a new web browser, too, called Silk, which is supposedly going to be very fast because it will use a special system where it will browse the internet partly using computing power from the cloud rather than from your tablet. I know what Krista and I will be wondering: does it play flash? I get tired of the iPad not playing flash. (UPDATE: It DOES run Flash!)

ANYWAY... I got all excited and thought I would share. I think this all looks pretty cool.


1 comment:

  1. Sounds really great except Amazon changes Kindle versions often; can the cloud keep up without fogging the screen? I wanted a Kindle for years and didn't get one because it was b/w and am glad I waited...still waiting.... Then there was Nook... and Apple kept improving their handhelds until there was iPad...waiting on these as well. This does look promising, but...what might tomorrow bring?

    Still holding my cash,
    Somewhere in Texas

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