Well at $199 with that kind of integrated experience there is little room for complaints! ($300 would be a different story.) Plus it supports Flash and most Android games/apps from Amazon app store.<p>If people put up a better email client on Amazon store for decent price it would be even better. For someone who already has Prime but no tablet - this is a no brainer.<p>Thinking of all this - I think this will eat into the iPad sales. There are going to be many people buying this instead of the iPad - price, weight, integration etc. Q4 iPad sales would be worth watching.<p>The new Kindles also seem to be blazing the new trail - high quality low price. $79 is just an awesome price and so is $99 for the touch Kindle. (Bezos took a jab at Apple in two ways - cabled sync/backup and companies that work hard to make customers pay more vs. companies that work hard to make customers pay less!)
Darn, the Kindle DX is still $379. Everything else got a nice price drop. I've been waiting for a hardware/software update to the Kindle DX and a possible price drop for quite a while now, but I'm not sure I'll ever get it at this point.
This has such a competitive price point that I think it'll do relatively well. I know it can watch movies, play music, browse, etc., do all these tablet things, but I'd definitely like to see it A) execute on those things (especially the browser) and B) have the apps so I don't feel left out for owning a non-iOS device all the time. I'm hoping this gets a high enough market share that Android developers start porting more iOS-only apps over.
Unlike the other Kindles, the Fire is not available outside the U.S. I had decided to one, but sadly it looks like that won't happen (at least not as soon as I hoped).
I'm assuming it will be available in retail outlets shortly after release. Hopefully the reading experience is decent, since I've been holding off on a Kindle purchase until this update. I didn't see any mention of ePub support ... any news on that?
> does not support connecting to ad-hoc (or peer-to-peer) Wi-Fi networks.<p>That struck me as a little odd at first, but after considering it for a minute, I think it's probably a smart move.
I wish they would put out info on the development situation for it quicker. Clearly they've given access to large publishers early, giving first mover advantage to the incumbents.
micro/SD slot?<p>I guess after xmas they wil introduce the 3G version with other subtle improvements - surprised they aren't going to use their whispernet.
I think it's not a good move for Amazon. E-Ink kindles are much more useful and friendly for book readers. They would choose to improve it with an html5 application platform (check this out; <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/azer/5966867029/" rel="nofollow">http://www.flickr.com/photos/azer/5966867029/</a>)
Just the other day there was a discussion on HN about how the biggest uses of time on the iPad are email and web browsing. This doesn't have email and it remains to be seen how well the "cloud web browser" thing works in practice.