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Originally Posted by twowheels
All of those things cost money, whether hardware or development time. None of those would increase my likelihood of buying one (which is currently tied to the fact that my PW1 still works just fine), and if they increased the price would only serve to decrease my likelihood of buying one.
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Sound: More hardware cost, more weight
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You'd never notice the difference in weight. The cost might be negligible.
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Card slot: More hardware cost, more things to go wrong
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So if there are more things to go wrong adding in a card slot, then lets take out 3G on those models. Let's take out any physical buttons and make it wake/sleep via a sleep cover. We'll just have touch. Oh and the front light, it has to go. It could go wrong. Oh and we also have to dump the ad supported firmware as the WiFi has to go as it could go wrong. And the software to deliver the adds could have bugs in it so it has to go too.
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Configurability: More development cost, more options to confuse less computer literate users, leading to higher support costs, more options often lead to more software bugs and user frustration (see the Kobo forums and all of the complaints about their very useful, but buggy firmware)
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If the interface is done in an intelligent way, it won't be confusing. Take the Kindle options as they are now. Add in more fonts and properly weighted fonts. That would do for a start. Now take the second and third set of settings and dump them. They are useless. Keep the current settings and make it the last options. Have a set of options for a smaller line height. And have options for a smaller margin. There's nothing complicated there. You can keep the interface very similar to what's there now and give useful options.
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Sometimes minimal but sufficient is better.
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But in this case, we have too minimal and it's not better. It's a lot worse. It's not actually sufficient. The options given go from bad to worse. How is that good?
So what we'll have is a Kindle with Touch and USB. We won't have a light. No buttons at all. No WiFi, Everything will be done via USB and Kindle for PC or Kindle for MAC. You'll use it to download your eBooks and you'll use it to side load. You won't be able to get any eBooks not from Amazon. You won't be able to have have any options for customizing. Just the one font family and the one set of margins and line height. All you can do is read. That's about it. We'll make it the most minimal device possible and do away with all models except this one. Will that satisfy your minimal is best because more hardware means it might break, might weigh more, might cost more and the firmware will stick with Mobi because AZW3 might has bugs and we only need one format anyway as more format is not minimal enough. We'll make this the lightest dumbest, minimalist hardware/software possible in case there could be at least one person out there that needs it like that. How's that sound?