andrew t elliott

Does Amazon really know what it’s doing?  I’m fairly sure that Bezos jumped the shark with this.

Only three months after staging a big press conference touting the second generation Kindle - which was a significantish improvement over the first model, if for nothing else than design and capacity - Amazon announced today that they would be adding a new model to the Kindle family - the DX.

DX claims a different user experience - larger screen, more information, more clearly, more simply.  But other than the larger screen, no real improvement.  Larger screen that was also a touch screen - okay, that would be something.  But this seems to be bigger for the sake of bigger.

Back in 2007, I thought Bezos said that the Kindle was hoping to follow the iPod model (a successful and quick launch of a new electronic device that builds success upon the myriad corpses of failed products).  The iPod model was strong, they didn’t even have different capacities selling at the same time until the 3rd Gen.  When they added to the line, it was to create a lower priced, more accessible Mini version.

They’ve made a real error on this and, while I understand that the textbook community will embrace it, I don’t know where a $500 ebook reader belongs in this world.

NOTE: I really love the video that they’ve put together. It consists entirely of people walking to a couch/bench/cab, sitting down and looking at this tablet, motionless. They’ve really made no attempt to make it seem sexy or cool.  It just looks like a very plausible “future” envisioned in 1998.