Anyone own a kindle?

[Rabbitisrich]

Nodnub and Cwericb, where are you getting these laptops for under $300? Any durability issues to consider?

 

I used to be a fan of Apple laptops, but after two breakdowns on two machines, I'm calling quits. Like Cadillacs, they are wonderful until everything falls apart.

[zarley]

I have a full copy of Windows 7 somewhere, and was auctually looking forward to trying a version of Linux on it to deal with the performance issues. Thanks Cwericb.

 

If you don't have a linux distro in mind, I'd suggest Linux Mint.  It's based on Ubuntu, but has all the multimedia drivers and whatnot already installed.  I've got it on my netbook and it works reasonably well.  I prefer it to the Ubuntu netbook remix actually.  Also, consider a chromium browser; firefox is a little resource hungry for a netbook.

[nodnub]

Nodnub and Cwericb, where are you getting these laptops for under $300? Any durability issues to consider?

 

I used to be a fan of Apple laptops, but after two breakdowns on two machines, I'm calling quits. Like Cadillacs, they are wonderful until everything falls apart.

 

 

If in the USA, I use www.newegg.com or www.ncixus.com

if in Canada, www.NCIX.com, www.newegg.ca

search for "NETbook"

There is a huge variation in prices between different models and in the value received for price.  

 

Most of the ASUS laptops I've seen a reasonably well-built. But then again, I am not using a 10 inch netbook as my everyday computer. Note that these 10 inch netbooks have slightly smaller keyboards too, which some users do not care for. The 12inch models seem to have full size keyboards.

[cwericb]

Yes, my Asus also came from Newegg - newegg.com for US or newegg.ca for Canada. I guess the smaller keyboard is just the price you have to pay for a 10" but it really is very portable and the keyboard is not a big problem. I've had mine now for about 9 months and the only complaint I have is that it is just a bit slower than my 17" Dell that I use at work. But slow is defined as taking perhaps 5 seconds to do something instead of 3 or 4 (have we become spoiled or what?). But nice screen, seems well built, and I wouldn't want to go any larger or smaller because the portability is excellent. I have a 15" laptop I use at home (soon to be replaced with a 17") and I keep the Asus for the cottage on weekends and travelling. It will do pretty well anything any other computer will do except there is no disk drive. I would think there will be some really good buys as we go towards Xmas.

[Myth465]

I have a full copy of Windows 7 somewhere, and was auctually looking forward to trying a version of Linux on it to deal with the performance issues. Thanks Cwericb.

 

If you don't have a linux distro in mind, I'd suggest Linux Mint.  It's based on Ubuntu, but has all the multimedia drivers and whatnot already installed.  I've got it on my netbook and it works reasonably well.  I prefer it to the Ubuntu netbook remix actually.  Also, consider a chromium browser; firefox is a little resource hungry for a netbook.

 

Thanks I will bookmark this. Also do you dual boot or just use Linux Mint.

 

Slickdeals and Fatwallet show that there are a few refurb Asus models for $200 and new ones for $250. The only thing lacking from the one I am looking at is bluetooth, which I dont use on my main PC.

 

cwericb, I think you are right and we will see some excellent Black Friday deals, and will also see some deep discounting on the older models.

 

 

[doc75]

Look into the ASUS UL30vt-A1  and the newer UL30jt  (maybe not released yet).

 

I did a lot of searching back in the spring, and was going to buy the UL30vt but decided to wait until the UL30jt was available, as I wasn't in a hurry.  (Once the JT comes out, I'll either buy it, or get the VT at a lower price than today's.)

 

I want a small, light, laptop with gobs of battery life.  I was originally looking at netbooks but felt I was really sucking up too many negatives for the small form factor:  short screen and low power amongst the issues.

 

The UL series notebooks are based on the the ultra-low volt chips and have fantastic  battery life and very good performance.  The ones I mention here are 13.3in and weigh 3.7lbs with battery.  They're fully powered.  Lots of RAM, gigabit ethernet, yada yada.

 

[zarley]

Thanks I will bookmark this. Also do you dual boot or just use Linux Mint.

 

On the netbook, I'm just running Mint.  It came with XP, which may have been fine, but a more modern OS makes some things (like wireless networking) easier to configure.  The netbook is just for surfing and playing media, so there's no need for me to dual-boot; Mint does everything I need.

 

I dual-boot win7/ubuntu on my desktop. 

[Rabbitisrich]

Thanks for the Newegg referral. I have been overpaying  :'(.

[Ross812]

I can second the Asus eee netbook.  I've had mine for two years and I still use it almost daily.  I take it with me when I am on business trips, and it sits on the coffee table at home so I can get on the net when my gf chooses a bad television program :) .  I stay very current with technology as I build computer systems in my spare time; in my opinion the Asus has the best price/performance trade off of any manufacturer.  HP and Sony also make good netbooks, but they are roughly $100 more than Asus for the comparable model.  Asus is not a cheap manufacturer by any stretch; I have used their motherboards for years without any problems.  As for the Kindle question, I think a tablet/kindle has the advantage of being treated more like a book you can pull out and read vs a netbook which requires you to find a comfortable way to use it.  I had some time to play with a Kindle DX and I'll be making a purchase soon.  If you need a device for the purpose of reading pdf's then the kindle is the best bet.  If you plan on watching movies and listening to music the I-pad would make more sense.  If you need to do some work (typing anything longer than a paragraph) then the netbook is you weapon of choice.

 

I'm excited to hear others using linux mint!  Its a great operating system!     

[Rabbitisrich]

I have the Kindle and it is absolutely wonderful for linear, page by page reading. However, the lack of a scroll feature, or any smooth method of jumping back and forth in a text, makes reading annual reports difficult. Also, data sets will frequently appear in a jumbled mess and instead of page numbers, you have "locations", which is a bit annoying when trying to skip to a specific topic.

 

As a book reader, however, the Kindle is pretty far ahead of the pack.

[Myth465]

Im ordering a Kindle today and hoping for a netbook by December.

[uncommonprofits]

I have the Kindle and it is absolutely wonderful for linear, page by page reading. However, the lack of a scroll feature, or any smooth method of jumping back and forth in a text, makes reading annual reports difficult. Also, data sets will frequently appear in a jumbled mess and instead of page numbers, you have "locations", which is a bit annoying when trying to skip to a specific topic.

 

As a book reader, however, the Kindle is pretty far ahead of the pack.

 

The Kindle device was a lot farther ahead of the pack a year ago than it is today.  A year ago Kindle's only real competition was Sony.  The Nook was just being introduced -- and Kobo was still in an incubation phase (under the Shortcovers banner).  

 

Back in March/10 an industry analyst estimated that Nook outsold Kindle 2 with the Nook taking about 53% market share.  Yes, the Kindle 3 puts AMZN back in the lead -- but they have a couple new players closing the gap.  The Nook and Kobo devices will be carried across the entire Wal-mart chain for this Christmas season.  The Kobo has two offerings (with the entry version starting at only $99).

 

So while the gap may be closing within e-ink itself -- there is also other competition to consider outside of e-ink.  A few days ago B&N announced their colour Nook (LCD display).  Meanwhile Kobo has had a whole affiliate lineup already offering such displays, some of which are $50-$70 less than the Nook - egs Velocity Micro Cruz Reader, Viewsonic Viewpad, Sylvania, the Literati™ by The Sharper Image® (most of these are 7" but Viewsonic apparently has a 9 or 10" version due out soon and Velocity Micro also has a Story Pad for the kids).  There is also the 7" Pandigital Novel reader that is powered by B&N in the States; but powered by Kobo in Canada.

 

Not saying that all these dedicated reading devices will survive - but the list has been pruned down a fair bit already now with support of a couple pretty significant players (ie.Kobo/Borders and B&N).  Nook and Kobo have a sensible strategy as their device sales go also.  While the Kindle will be available at Best Buy -- Nook and Kobo devices will be available across the entire Wal-Mart chain.  I suspect there is a much higher percentage of shoppers at Wal-mart that are book lovers than at Best Buy.... if simply for the reason that Wal-mart actually sells books.  This is very much about content (read below).  To put this another way who would you want to sell an ereader to:  the customer that keeps going to Wal-mart to buy the latest releases (who is now your customer) OR the customer that goes to Best Buy and needs the latest gadget out there?

 

To this point we are only talking dedicated reading devices.... e-ink and LCD.  Yes, looking in the rear view mirror - e-ink is the current best technology that can be produced affordably.  However, something better is most likely to come along.  Colour E-Ink is apparently several years down the road; however, some are saying that Qualcomm's Mirasol display could revolutionize things as early as next year.  That brings us to tablets such as the Ipad, Samsung Galaxy, Blackberry Playbook, Dell, future HP, Asus, Acer, Toshiba tablets (who have I missed?  Maybe HTC, Motorola, LG, Nokia, Microsoft??).  As current technology stands they are crowding the Kindle's space -- this will become ever much so when/if multi-use functioning becomes more viable.  One might think the feather in Kindle's hat is the eventual rollout of colour e-ink - but if that's the case then this technology would likely also become just as viable for all of this tablet/LCD sort of stuff that either exists or is coming very soon.

 

Bottom line is whether you buy any of the dedicated e-ink or LCD e-readers OR any of these tablets expect them to be obsolete way faster than we have seen in recent times.  This whole digital evolution of literature has just begun - it is going to change rapidly.  With the device technology changing so rapidly - the biggest windfalls will likely involve content.  The customer has a couple of choices:

1. Purchase content where you get locked into Kindles vision of being the iTunes of the future.

OR

2. Purchase content that is open and portable from device to device (past, present and future). The Sony and Nook make this possible from varying degrees of effort from the user.  Kobo's approach is to make it as effortless as possible -- eventually seamless.  There are still a lot of wrinkles but they have the right approach - here is The eReaders Bill of Rights (the Kobo Perspective):

http://blog.kobobooks.com/2010/09/17/ereadersbillofrights/

 

Other than the smaller players mentioned above some of the bigger ones are buying into the Kobo philosophy too.  To date they have had announcements to be pre-packaged with Samsung Galaxy, Blackberry Playbook and HTC Desire HD.  Not only are they prepackaged -- but Kobo is also doing some innovation in terms of reading hubs, social media, etc.  

[Myth465]

I think these things are always going to be a moving target. For me I print out tons of paper everyday and got an interesting document which was 200 pages. My eyes are killing me from being on a PC all day and having a rough weekend. I am starting to worry about killing so many trees. The ereader will allow me to read offline quite a bit more and read more at night.

 

I doubt I buy more then 1 or 2 books. I went with the Kindle because it just seems slicker then the other devices, and will do what I need it to. My only concern is PDFs but its not really for annuals or anything like that.

[Rabbitisrich]

UCP, you are almost certainly right on your view of technological obsolescence, but you are overstating Amazon's ability and desire to become Itunes. Kindle already allows for .mobi and there are solid conversion tools for .epub. Kindle's conversion service for supported formats is free, and although somewhat clunky due to the need to email documents, it works fine.

 

The hardware argument should dissuade people who don't want a book substitute now, but the Kindle doesn't overly constrain customer choice.

[uncommonprofits]

UCP, you are almost certainly right on your view of technological obsolescence, but you are overstating Amazon's ability and desire to become Itunes. Kindle already allows for .mobi and there are solid conversion tools for .epub. Kindle's conversion service for supported formats is free, and although somewhat clunky due to the need to email documents, it works fine.

 

The hardware argument should dissuade people who don't want a book substitute now, but the Kindle doesn't overly constrain customer choice.

 

The flipside of Kindle's internal conversion are the third party open source developers.  There are advantages and disadvantages of supporting these open source developers -- but for Kindle there would seem to be little reason to at all.  Playing fair and in the spirit of their open philosophy, Kobo seems to be supporting the most popular one (Calibre) quite strongly.  Obviously with the massive percentage of Kindle units out there, this represents a strong opportunity in terms of content sales.  Calibre works pretty good and even has free access to newspaper and magazine web-content from around the world (It works with Kindle, Kobo, Nook, Sony -- most of the popular dedicated devices out there are supported).  It works pretty smoothly too -- but this and Amazon's conversion tools are more acceptable to the present early adapters.  Later adapters wont want the hassle -- so from both sides it will need to get better.

 

As for my Amazon Itunes comment, I just see them going into this with a winner take all attitude just like Apple did.  It was their intent and desire to do so from the beginning.  Things are shaping up much more differently this time around though.  Publishers have the horrific music experience to look back on - where Apple did things their way (period).  The open source community has also grown tremendously since then.  Back then Linux was more of a cult thing -- perhaps to a degree it still is but there are other far greater movements with Android having evolved from this (and Apple's very closed presence).  Don't mean to dwell on my (perhaps already overstated?) point -- but I ran across an interesting timeline graph:

http://www.teleread.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/ebooks-distributors-timeline.gif

 

More and more open players are entering this space -- this is a very different situation than Apple had with iTunes.  B&N is really only involved with this in the States and have followed AMZN's & Sony's lead in being more device oriented.  Kobo on the other hand is much more content focussed and a global player -- with Cheung Kong (ie. Li Ka-shing) being one of their partners.  While Kobo might be outsized in the US by AMZN and B&N -- China is the real prize here and they might well have the strongest partner in Cheung Kong to get it.  Of course I feel that Indigo could be holding a significant hidden asset here with Kobo seeming to be the best situated global open player.  One of the more silent players in this (thus far) is Blio -- and my last look at them were supported by Microsoft.  I have often wondered if there might be some kind of a fit.... Blio is good at the graphic kind of stuff -- while Kobo is good with the straight text and commerce part.  I have also wondered if a Microsoft Kobo might be a good fit with the Microsoft Zune in MSFT taking some market share from iTunes. 

 

Just a few more thoughts -- for those that own Kindles might want to take a look at Calibre for the free newspaper web content, etc  -- and also the ability to buy books outside of the box if need be.

http://calibre-ebook.com/

[TorontoRaptorsFan]

Just adding my 2 cents...

 

I work in the technology field and am an early adopter of new technology. I currently own an iPad, Kindle 3, iPhone, and iMac.

 

The new Kindle is incredible. I love to read and I can easily read for hours and hours on the Kindle versus the Kindle app on my iPad or iPhone. I'm converting more and more of my library over to a digital format and reducing the clutter of books has been a very enlightening process. I also love the selection Amazon has for books. The only hardcover books I purchase nowadays are cookbooks but even then I'm trying to cut back on my collection as I have over 150 titles + right now.

 

The iPad's Zinio app is great! Love to get my issues of BusinessWeek, and Bloomberg Markets on there along with a slew of other magazines.

[bookie71]

I was just in Target and they have the Kindle for sale.

[Myth465]

Thanks all for the recommendations. I really like the Kindle and I think it will dramatically increase the amount of material I read.

 

Amazon inmo is almost as good as apple at designing functional products. The Kindle is extremely user friendly and has made some great compromises between simplicity and features.

 

Now on to the netbook.

[Ballinvarosig Investors]

The new Kindle is incredible. I love to read and I can easily read for hours and hours on the Kindle versus the Kindle app on my iPad or iPhone.

That's my experience too, the Kindle simply makes reading a pleasure.

 

Don't forget, that the Kindle opens up a lifetime of completely free reading at Project Gutenberg.

[Ross812]

You might want to google eee pad and see what you think.  It looks like a cross between an I-pad and a netbook. 

[meiroy]

 

Any of you Kindle (newer touch version or Fire) owners use it to read financial documents? Is it workable on such a small screen?

[AZ_Value]

 

Any of you Kindle (newer touch version or Fire) owners use it to read financial documents? Is it workable on such a small screen?

 

I bought the new Kindle Fire mostly because the previous kindle just wasn't suited for all the PDF documents I read.

I have been reading various PDF documents since I got it and I took a PDF version of BAC 10K to read on my thanksgiving trip last week and I have to say it is much much better; But on this aspect I would assume something like the Ipad might be even better but I'm too cheap to pay that price.

 

The other features (web browsing, videos etc...) have all worked well so far also but I don't demand much on that side.

[meiroy]

 

Any of you Kindle (newer touch version or Fire) owners use it to read financial documents? Is it workable on such a small screen?

 

I bought the new Kindle Fire mostly because the previous kindle just wasn't suited for all the PDF documents I read.

I have been reading various PDF documents since I got it and I took a PDF version of BAC 10K to read on my thanksgiving trip last week and I have to say it is much much better; But on this aspect I would assume something like the Ipad might be even better but I'm too cheap to pay that price.

 

The other features (web browsing, videos etc...) have all worked well so far also but I don't demand much on that side.

 

Thanks. I also considered the iPad as it has a larger screen, the down side for me is that it's iOS and expensive, as you say.  Good to hear the kindle fire is decent enough for reading 10Ks.

 

[DCG]

I currently do a lot of reading my iPad, but have been thinking about picking up either a Kindle Fire HD or a Kindle Paperwhite to mostly use for reading, as I'd think I'd like to have someone smaller than the iPad for reading (and don't want to spend the cash for the iPad mini).

 

Anyone on here have either the Fire or Paperwhite? I like the idea of an e-ink reader, but also ink I'd miss not being able to easily go online when reading.

 

Also thinking about a Nexus 7, as I could install both the kindle and nook app.

[matjone]

I never had the paper white, but I have received a fire and a regular kindle as gifts.  I think that I'd rather have a basic reader than the fire.  The fire has a much shorter battery life and causes more eye strain, and I actually look at the easy internet access as a disadvantage.  I'd be reading a book, and then my concentration would wander and I'd be on the internet wasting time.