[molman]

Been interesting reading this thread, and to watch the media report this. There is a definite halo around Amazon and the mind share it commands. For me personally this announcement didn't really excite me as much as I thought it would. Beyond the fact that Amazon with these devices continues to put downward price pressure on eInk Readers and small factor tablets, the devices themselves didn’t really blow me away.

The situation with all the models and multiple variants I personally think creates a mess of choice with price points just too close to each other. Whilst I can appreciate that Ad supported models lead to some nice marketing in being able to say "starting at $79.." etc, I do feel they add complication.

I also must admit that I'm not a huge fan of the industrial design/aesthetics. Whilst I obviously need to reserve judgement until I can hold one myself there feels like a real lack of a design signature with this collection of devices. Everything from the grill like speaker vent on the Touch, to the bezel proportions of the Touch vs Non-Touch to the choice of the silver finish just don't enthral me. They just don't tied together from me like SONY's ereaders did, or even the Kindle 3 and DX did. I get a real sense of looking different for the sake of looking different with a real lack of class.

As to the Kindle Fire, it's a real oddball for me. Amazon services are not as pervasive for me, so I probably lack some of the affiliation those in the US may feel, but it really seems like a mixed bag. The coverflow style UI doesn't present me with a paradigm that makes me sit up, nor does the obvious foundation that is obviously around content acquisition and discovery from Amazons own store. The feature trimming also leaves a lot of interesting applications for tablets by the wayside. Losing the GPS and the maps potential that is rather nice on these larger screen devices verse smartphones.

On top of this we have an Android 2.3 fork with Icecream Sandwich (3.x/4) just around the corner, and the loss of the all the Google apps and services which have a nice value proposition to many users.

Sprinkle in the SilkBrowser which raises the hairs on the back of my kneck with regards to privacy and creepy data collections and really at the end of the day I just feel a little underwhelmed.

Will these devices sell well? For sure. As I said the Kindle Fire is great for the simple fact that it has already set a bar for other devices of such a size as seen with the recent Playbook price drop. As for innovation however, none of this announcement really does much for me, and honestly I was hoping for something a little more.