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I'm a fairly technical person. (Software development, network engineering, fair amount of experience in embedded systems, etc.) and I chose the Kindle for features.
It seriously irked me that Sony had made so little of their hardware: no dictionary lookup, no search, no annotation. These three things seemed to me to be the absolute base level features you should have if you're bringing computing power to books. None of them are rocket science. If you can't do that, what are you up to? And then to bring out a 2nd gen product that is still nothing but a page viewer? I was absolutely flummoxed. Add to that the fact that I'd had enough bad experiences with Sony that I figured I was safe in assuming that this was going to be the way it was in the future and the CS would be status quo (unacceptable). It's sad for them. I they'd offered a minimal feature set I would have likely overlooked the numerous times they'd pissed me off royally in the past for the gorgeous display and hardware. Seriously, I'd vowed never ever in life again to buy another Sony product but when I saw that thing on the shelf I wanted it. There wasn't much in the way of competition and I'd been waiting for years for a device like this. I saw that display and was ready to buy it. Then I did the research and looked at the feature set and realized despite my absolute lust for the hardware, Sony would piss me off again like they have for years. It was a no-brainer like turning down the booty call from that guy you know is just going to break your heart. Despite my being a pretty gung-ho ebook customer, they lost me. Even at $100+ under the price I would end up paying, they lost me. They pretty well colossally lost me.
Then Amazon came in and offered me that lovely display with the features I wanted and a huge selection of books wrapped up in a dreadfully ugly package for bunches of money more and I was quite happy to say "yes, please!" because it was really that much better. I'll take function over form any day. I don't care if it's pretty. I don't care if it's cheap. I don't care if I can have it whenever I want. I care if it's better. I'm quite capable of getting books, converting them, loading them. The wireless wasn't a selling feature to me. I didn't need it. Now that I have it, I see that it's freakin brilliant! I would've bought it anyway but the store and the Whispernet is the icing on the cake.
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