Quote:
Originally Posted by Talldog
The 1000S ($749) doesn't have WiFi, and costs $260 more than the DX ($489). That's a lot of money for a digitizer. The 1000SW has the digitizer and WiFi, but goes for $849, and as far as I know isn't even available yet.
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Irex probably sells in the 100s of times less devices than Amazon. Economies of scale would lower the prices.
I am sure that the Wacom touchscreen wouldn't add much cost to the device if manufactured by the hundreds of thousands of pieces like Amazon would when they promote their new products on their frontpage at amazon.com the worlds biggest online retailer.
Adding WiFi in such a product is not expensive either. It's actually very optimized and cheap these days. The only concern sometimes is R&D required to make sure that there wouldn't be interference between the WiFi and the 3G modem in the same device, as well as R&D optimizations done with hardware WiFi/3G on/off switches and so on to optimize the power consumption of those wireless access systems, since those are the biggest power draw of such devices.
But anyways, I believe Amazon has no excuse not to do it. Unless of course Amazon would quickly release a Kindle DXTW or something, that adds Touch, adds WiFi and unlockes the 3G modem.
The solution to the internationalization of the 3G modem would be for the hardware engineers to design a clever 3G modem module slot somewhere on the device, all utilizing the same standard antennae or even have the antennae be user replaceable, and then make it possible for users worldwide to just buy the 3G modem module that works for them.
The Amazon website is available in many more countries, so even though book publishing and licencing is a huge pile of mess, Amazon charges a quite unsubsidized price for their hardware as it is, there is no need claim that the egg is needed before the chicken. Amazon needs to put the device on the worldwide markets and then make it open standards compliant (blogs, newspapers, pdf, html, txt, jpg, etc..) and then services will automatically come to it and more monetization can happen. Without a device, nothing can happen.
My only explanation is that for some reason, Amazon is not interested in selling more Kindles. At least not yet.