Quote:
Originally Posted by Choisya
Thanks Slite but it would be a start if they set up the 'whisper technology' in the UK where they would have the largest readership in Europe. Per capita I think the UK publish and read more books than the US so they are missingout on a very large market.
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Setting up 'whisper technology' would be a huge investment that Amazon just could not afford to make. The problem is that the Kindle as currently designed uses CDMA cell-phone technology to run whispernet by piggy-backing off Sprint's cell towers. Unfortunately, CDMA is not particularly common outside the US, so in order to get whispernet working in Europe they would need either their own CDMA netword (not going to happen) or to create a GSM/UMTS version of the Kindle.
Now they could have gotten around this problem by going GSM/UMTS as Apple did with the iPhone, but there are technical reasons why CDMA technology works better in the context of Amazon's sales model.
CDMA locks the network routing to the serial number of the handset; not a SIM card. This not only reduces a layer of complexity (they don't need to add a SIM slot) but also helps them lock down the system. IF a Kindle used a SIM, someone could gain access to whispernet simply by putting the SIM in another device; and Amazon most emphatically doesn't want to go there: Not when they're paying the data charges.
I think these kinds of issues are slowing the Kindle down just as much as any technical ones.