Quote:
Originally Posted by ricsmania
Well, in my opinion, 4 GB is ridiculous considering memory prices these days, and even more absurd is the fact that the Kindle doesn't have a MicroSD slot. I really doubt Amazon engineers would have trouble adding a card slot without increasing the physical size, so it's probably a market decision.
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I'm guessing the decision on size and not adding a card slot was about more than hardware cost. The Kindle can get very slow when you have thousands and thousands of documents indexed. Searching takes forever. Also, there were issues with the Kindle 1 dealing with the external memory and card slot. Sometimes if you moved a bunch of files from one card to another it left some duplicates which, in my case, made the Kindle very slow and unstable. I don't know if it was perpetually indexing or what at that point. It got better when I cleaned everything up. And if people are dragging and dropping using their computer, you know you'll have a lot of instances where people will accidentally copy rather than move the file. Also that Kindle had a small amount of internal storage and all wireless deliveries went to it, so it would fill up and things wouldn't get delivered. Customers didn't think to check how much memory was free internally because they thought they had plenty of space. This generated a lot of support contacts. When they took the card slot out for the Kindle 2 I figured this was likely part of the reason. They could have fixed a lot of this stuff in firmware but this was likely a quicker and cheaper solution. I doubt they've lost many customers by only having 2GB, or now 4GB.