Amazon comments on lack of SD card and user-removable battery

[josgood]

My thoughts also. I AM upset about the battery being non user replaceable!
I'm counting the days till 2/25. Jack

[desertgrandma]

Originally Posted by Sporadic

Thanks
I think you are taking it too personally. Amazon is a business. They decided that a smaller form was more important to potential customers then a SD slot or a user-replaceable battery. I'm sure that the decision to axe the SD slot was much easier to make once they decided to bump up the internal memory so much.

Darn straight I'm taking it personally. They offer less, for more money, change the unique shape to appease the masses, don't even address the folder issue and I'm not supposed to take it personally?

Yes, they are a business, and whoever decided that offering a smaller form was more important than an SD slot or user replaceable batter, didn't do his homework.

I have my two originals, and am content.

What I care about is being told this is an 'improvement' and that I should be grateful some techie somewhere decides for me how much memory is needed. Bull.

[desertgrandma]

Originally Posted by josgood

My thoughts also. I AM upset about the battery being non user replaceable!
I'm counting the days till 2/25. Jack

Welcome to MobileRead, Jack.

Lots to read for free here, and lots of information about different devices.


Look around, ask questions, and enjoy.

[Ervserver]

Memory being so inexpensive they could have easily loaded the Kindle II with 4 GB or more....I have a feeling they found a point where the Kindle software had issues with too much memory. Afterall they market the Kindle as multimedia, added stereo speakers to it, but in the end it is very limited as to what you can store on it, sure the 1500 book number sounds like a lot but start adding newspapers, magazine, music, audio books, etc 1.4 GB is ate up in no time.

Originally Posted by Sporadic

Thanks I have a family of three and the one in the picture is the baby. I may have to PM you for some toy tips for them.

I think you are taking it too personally. Amazon is a business. They decided that a smaller form was more important to potential customers then a SD slot or a user-replaceable battery. I'm sure that the decision to axe the SD slot was much easier to make once they decided to bump up the internal memory so much.

[Nate the great]

Originally Posted by Ervserver

Memory being so inexpensive they could have easily loaded the Kindle II with 4 GB or more....I have a feeling they found a point where the Kindle software had issues with too much memory. Afterall they market the Kindle as multimedia, added stereo speakers to it, but in the end it is very limited as to what you can store on it, sure the 1500 book number sounds like a lot but start adding newspapers, magazine, music, audio books, etc 1.4 GB is ate up in no time.

That is somewhat true. The Kindle had trouble handling the contents of one of the Blackmask 10k ebook DVDs. It crashed after listing around 6k files. That might explain 2GB instead of 4GB.

[krisk]

She's not taking it personally. She's taking it from the same place most of the rest of us are. We're Kindle 1 "adopters" as Amazon puts it. We're starting out with what should be the prototype, and everything else should simply be bigger and better from here on out. Do you see us fussing about the button positions? Nope, not really. The joystick, maybe a little, but other than that, no. About the change in the keyboard? not so much. The change in the back? (I fussed about that), not much. Where is everyone coming soligly down on? The card and the battery.

[krisk]

*solidly*

[desertgrandma]

Originally Posted by krisk

*solidly*

yes.....we figured..........

[Nate the great]

Actually, I thought the new keyboard was an improvement.

[SpiderMatt]

Originally Posted by desertgrandma

Darn straight I'm taking it personally. They offer less, for more money, change the unique shape to appease the masses, don't even address the folder issue and I'm not supposed to take it personally?

Yes, they are a business, and whoever decided that offering a smaller form was more important than an SD slot or user replaceable batter, didn't do his homework.

I have my two originals, and am content.

What I care about is being told this is an 'improvement' and that I should be grateful some techie somewhere decides for me how much memory is needed. Bull.

Sporadic is right, though. Amazon's goal is to move more devices and they think they can do that with a sleeker device. I actually agree with Amazon on that point. The K2 stands to be more successful than the K1. I'm disappointed about the lack of SD and user replaceable battery (especially the latter) but the faster refresh and better gray-scale has already won my money. So for consumers like me, Amazon has met its goal. Also, I've only had reason thus far to use a 1GB SD card on my K1. So the K2 will actually have more internal memory than I've been using on my K1. I also suspect, as has been mentioned above, that the Kindle has issues with a large number of files and that this is why Amazon has limited the storage capacity.

[catsittingstill]

Meh.

I care about the SD card and user-replaceable battery. 60$ for a new battery is a lot, but what's even worse is that you have to send your reader--and thus your whole e-book library--away for what, three days? Two weeks? Six weeks? Each way, maybe? to have Amazon put in the battery for you. And that's to make it *thinner*? Who cares how thin it is?

Not only that, but they've "improved it" so that what used to take 2 hours to charge now takes 4 hours.

And *still* no folders? What is so blooming hard about folders?

On the other hand, I hear Plastic Logic is coming out with a reader that will be nearly 8 1/2 X 11, and display PDFs natively.

Amazon better get cracking--it has about a year and a half or so left to get it right.

[MattEcho]

Originally Posted by SpiderMatt

Sporadic is right, though. Amazon's goal is to move more devices and they think they can do that with a sleeker device. I actually agree with Amazon on that point. The K2 stands to be more successful than the K1. I'm disappointed about the lack of SD and user replaceable battery (especially the latter) but the faster refresh and better gray-scale has already won my money. So for consumers like me, Amazon has met its goal. Also, I've only had reason thus far to use a 1GB SD card on my K1. So the K2 will actually have more internal memory than I've been using on my K1. I also suspect, as has been mentioned above, that the Kindle has issues with a large number of files and that this is why Amazon has limited the storage capacity.

Gotta agree with SpiderMatt and Sporadic. I'm also buying a K2, despite the disappointment in loss of SD slot (I couldn't care less about replaceable battery). I would just add that I'm sure Amazon had many factors to weigh in making the decision to remove the SD slot. And it's guaranteed they considered what their customers would think. I trust they had some good reasons to remove it.

[bwaldron]

Originally Posted by Ervserver

sure the 1500 book number sounds like a lot but start adding newspapers, magazine, music, audio books, etc 1.4 GB is ate up in no time.

And don't forget the index files used for book searching, which will eat up a significant chunk of the available memory.

[hhdumpling]

Originally Posted by bwaldron

And don't forget the index files used for book searching, which will eat up a significant chunk of the available memory.

Well, the K1 didn't really have all that much internal memory and it looks like the K1 and K2 share the same exact OS. Yet, the K2 is keeping 600MB to itself! I suspect they already allotted quite a bit of internal memory for things like index files.

The only oddball I can think of that could potentially take up anywhere near that much space is the TTS feature. I imagine those voice and vocabulary files are fairly large.

[Kris777]

Originally Posted by texasnightowl

The lack of the SD card is the only thing that I really don't like about the K2. Since we don't have folder support still, using SD cards can serve that purpose by having a different card for different categories.

Not to mention, I don't like loading my Kindle up with everything because I don't like scrolling through pages and pages of books. I usually only keep about 6-8 pages of books on at any one time. So I'm not going to come close to using 2gb of space anyway.

JetBook has both -SD card and folder support