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Originally Posted by lordvetinari2
Oh dear, even the manual is ugly! A5-sized pages printed as A4, and all the images have bitmapped text. Doesn't say much for an ebook reader, I'd think.
This thing looks like a prop from the original HHGH TV miniseries (c'me on, someone say another TV series, this is fun!). I don't care much about design: I don't own anything Applish, but this is just plain stupid. I don't really need a keyboard, either, and that occupies too much room.
Oh Sony, where(fore) art thou, Sony?
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On the other hand, though, reading the manual, Amazon seems to have made some good decisions. They included a cover, you can change the battery (although it does seem proprietary...), and of course the content is king. Also, in black-and-white manual drawings, with the cover on, you can almost forget it looks like the early '80s ;-)
The choice to go with EVDO instead of WiFi is... confusing. Cell service is certainly more widely available, but EVDO is still fairly rare, I believe. Wifi, on the other hand, is becoming prevalent very quickly.
Also, of course, this is about the worst example I can imagine of the "platform" model that I rant about every chance I get ;-) I can't imagine Amazon is invested in making the best reading hardware possible; they're just trying to sell more books. And that's evident in the formats they support and the fact that they require conversion before reading popular formats like DOC and PDF.
The fact that Amazon is getting into the hardware business, though, gives me hope that the e-reader market will become a hot battleground. Maybe then we'll see some better options.