Overall, the Amazon Kindle Fire announced today (available November 15) is net positive on the give/take from what was leaked and speculated about before the release announcement.
Minuses:
Amazon Prime membership is just the one month trial, instead of the rumored year. Add $80 to make it stay (for a year).
Rumored to possibly be available next month. Nuh-uh. November, as stated above, IF one gets in line now.
Pluses:
$200, not $250
Dual core, not the rumored single core
Email app (designed to import email from Gmail, Yahoo!, etc.); was thought that would be missing.
Also, net pluses (with a couple of privacy cavils) for the Amazon Silk Browser. Overall, probably a Very Good Thing for what the Kindle Fire will be asked to do by most users.
All the rest as rumored/leaked pretty much spot on. Tempting, very tempting.
Real cost for optimal use:
$200 for Kindle Fire
$80 for a year’s “membership” in Amazon Prime (something I have already been seriously considering anyway)
$30 for a zip sleeve (why pay $200 for a techie toy and transport it w/o some sort of protection? Yeh, I know people do dumb things like that all the time, but I expect my equipment to last until I tire of it. *heh*)
So, about $310 real up front costs. Back end costs for apps are an unknown at this point. Some will be free, of course; others? No real idea at this point. Books and other Amazon product orders are more than likely just stuff I’d be buying anyway.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUtmOApIslE
Mini-update: While reading a Kindle edition of a David Weber book referenced in a later post, it came upon me again just how handy reading ebooks can be. While I prefer reading books in my web browser, the Kindle app for PCs is Good Enough, and does have the added advantage of slightly easier referencing (and syncing across devices), which I imagine would also hold true for any physical Kindle. For example, just now I ran across a word whose root I knew and which, from context and root, I was sure I understood; even so since I had never actually read this particular word before, I I CLICKed on it and immediately had the definition verifying my understanding. That’s slightly more convenient than my old practice of keeping a dictionary handy for similar use, although it doesn’t afford the enjoyment I frequently had from continuing to read on down the page in the dictionary (sometimes for pages and pages… ), etc. *heh*
I’ve been a Prime member from the beginning, and I LOVE it!!!One of the nice things about Prime is that you can add up to about 5 (I think) family members to the account, and they will get – as I understand it – ALMOST all of the Prime advantages. I currently have my brother signed up, and he thanks me for it regularly.
However (again, as I understand it), it is ONLY the primary Prime member who gets the advantages of the free instant videos and a few other things. So, to see those for free, you need to be logged in to Amazon via the Prime account’s login.
As I said, I love Prime! LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE it – best annual $80 I ever spend!
One caution, though… That 2 day free shipping? Sometimes it comes in ONE! (*gasp*oh-the-horror!*) LOL
Yeh, well, Kat, the “only the primary member gets the streaming content” thing is one reason for the Win7 Media Center computer about to be connected to the main TV… 😉 As far as I’m concerned, Windows Media Center is the one and only true “killer app” in Windows 7. The rest of it I can live without, except for ONE application that needs Win7 fof full functionality (nothing I have done, even with some fairly hands on help from the WINE developers, has gotten full functionality in a ‘nix/WINE environment out of this ONE app that I MUST have, so I need some “legacy Windows machines” for it, at least).
I’m seriously tempted by the Kindle Fire to reprioritize some purchase scheduling. I don’t know if I’ll actually yield to the temptation to do so, but I am tempted…
I don’t see any reason why I couldn’t log on to Amazon from the Linux box serving our TV (it also connects to *our* server so we can play the movies we’ve stored – no more sorting through DVDs!)…
Are you SURE the Win7 Media Center is your best option???? 😉
My laptop actually has Win… Gee, I dunno which one; I never use the durned thing, but it’s the version that’s about 14 months old, I think… anyway, when we stripped it off and installed Ubuntu, I did keep a small partition for Windows. But, as I said, I never run it.
There are a couple things I bump into where I need to run WINE, but generally I find that these are programs I either use once and never again OR that I use so infrequently that it’s the same thing. Of course, I’m not as much of a power user as you are… But MY David is geek-level, and he only uses it when he HAS to have 100% compatability with XL for a project at work. Rare.
ANYWAY… 😉 Different strokes, and I know I’m preaching to the choir when I express disdain for Windows in general **grinz**
Also have the computer configured to use our cable connection to tune in TV and as a “time-shifter”. WMC is killer for managing TV viewing, has excellent capailties in managing other media and really, really beats out every single ‘nix solution forsuch things that I’ve tried (and I’ve tried a BUNCH of ’em). The closest I was able to come to the capabilities of WMC on the ‘nix side is LinuxMCE, and it just has not (yet) managed to do TV tuning (of OTA and cable) really well with any of the hardware I’ve tried it with–and I’ve tried it with a bunch. *profound sigh* I’d really like to use LinuxMCE for its home automation features, but its failure to work well as a TV tuning app means my Wonder Woman couldn’t use it to time shift her TV stuff to fit her schedule.
Oh, and I had an extra license for Win7 Pro sitting around unused. *heh* (The Win7 Starter that came on the lil netbook was… not workable for.. anything.)
My one essential Win app that I MUST have 100% functionality in is a music transcription software that is so many orders of magnitude better than any of the ‘nix solutions that are available that the ‘nix apps aren’t even in the same star system. *sigh*
But yeh, Linux/Unix systems are soooo nice in so many ways. I just repaired an “old” (well, yeh: seven years old!) Sony Vaio desktop for our son-in-law to use as an internet/network only media center (no TV tuning, apart from HDMI out for the TV) and Ubuntu 11.04 will work nicely for their purposes, but then they do not plan on tuning in over-the-air or cable TV, just internet programming and media present on their networked computers. If that’s all we were after, then a ‘nix environment would work in our application as well.