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Originally Posted by emellaich
I'm guessing the 3G Fire really gives them problems with their business model. I think their hope is that this is about media consumption (video and music). However, with the shortage of memory and no SD slot it is designed as a cloud device. It would be tough to stream much video if you are bound by the pricing of a 3G connection.
I can't believe that the cost of an SD slot would have been that much and I think you could have found room to squeeze it in without impacting the form factor much. Furthermore, as a consumer expandable memory would be a HUGE bonus. So, I assume the lack of such a feature was a deliberate decision related to Amazon's business model.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by DuaneAA
Are they going to implement some kind of local storage of their Prime video streaming service so you can watch something when you are not with range of an available WiFi connection? Could this be the reason it doesn't have user removable storage (ie an SD slot)? If it had that capability, I would probably get one. I have several similar devices, but really would like something that had the option of downloading videos while at home to watch while I'm at the gym where I don't have WiFi access.
Duane
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I want a 3G Fire but I realize that with a better (much better) navigation method relative to the keyboard Kindle 3G, Amazon can't afford to foot the enormous bill from AT&T for millions of people using a Fire just to browse the internet, to download stuff, to watch movies from where ever they are stored outside the tablet.
So Amazon has to limit the 3G just as they have done in the Kindle 3G. Read the fine print and it says, "no downloading except Amazon products" and then they give you a cost schedule which as I remember is 15 cents a MB, 99 cents if you are out of the country, and you can't do it at all in Canada. Yet all of us know that if we bring up GMail and check out the emails, the browser is downloading that content, just as it does Wikipedia, or a map.
So Amazon is keeping track of the browser, or rather Amazon's computers are deciding if what you are doing is ok and I believe there are limits that we (or most of us) don't know about. The other limits are imposed by the difficulty of using the Kindle keyboard 3G as a browser. Some compare the operation as "etch-a-sketch." It is very tiresome.
So Fire (the next or this one) will never have total free 3G without some kind of charging . The Kindle 3Gs of last year don't have it. The question is what will Amazon let us have.
Will they go so far as to establish limits like 100MB, 500MB, 1GB, 10GB a month and at what cost.
The lack of SD storage is deliberate I believe and not for the 50 to 70 cents or so it would have taken to put in a port and connect it, but so that Amazon's great "cloud" storage gets a real jump start. Of course how do you connect to it without WiFi or a cable to your computer. Will we really get free large amounts of free 3G when we are going to the "cloud?" I don't know what they are going to do, but I am waiting to see. I believe that we will start getting some reports first from the new touch gray scale Kindles that will make browsing much easier. That will tell us what will happen with "next" year's model of Fires.
There is one obvious (I think) way to add storage to your Kindle whichever one it is, and that is to hook up a Flash drive or an external storage device which could include a SD/uD/xD card reader/adapter.
I have all those but I have never had the reason to hook them up to the little USB2 port. Amazon provides you the cable to do that, so why doesn't someone do it and let us know what happened.