Quote:
Originally Posted by pilotbob
Why is it that a new iPod can come out every year... have more features, bigger hard drives (storage) more batter life and be the same price or cheaper.
The Kindle 1 was released 2 years ago. The Kindle 2 is the same device in a different case. I can't imagine which it should be more with an SD card slot. Assuming the eInk screen price hasn't changed, I can't imaging that CDMA chips, switches and SD card slots have gotten more expense. Heck, I have seen $99 phones with microSD slots in them.
BOb
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In addition to the good points raised by mrkai, the iPod uses many parts that are manufactured by multiple companies and they do such a volume business that these parts manufacturers are vying for their business. Kindle has two rather inflexible parts that we know of and they're likely the most expensive parts.
I do agree that the microSD slot would have been a very small cost addition. Likely only a few dollars. I wonder if part of the reason they eliminated it was possible customer issues. There have been complaints about battery drain and sluggishness while indexing when people moved a lot of stuff around. Plus the small internal memory can fill up fast since everything gets delivered there. If you don't have free space, your deliveries bounce. This probably led to customer complaints when they didn't get their stuff and couldn't figure out why. Moving stuff through the Content Manager is a bit of a pain and you know how some people are about moving files with the computer. Maybe they decided having larger internal memory and nothing else was more of a savings in the customer service department and that fewer people would be annoyed by that than are annoyed with having to spend time managing their device.
Of course 2GB internal memory and a microSD would be lovely but that would be even more expensive and possibly encourage people to keep more stuff on there than they could look through without frustration at the lack of content organization.