Kindle 4 (NT) - worth is used? or new basic?

[burnafterreading]

Originally Posted by biteme

I have often bought second hand devices, but used ereaders are something I wouldn't bother with.

For a start, you can buy nice new ereaders, with warranty, for around the $100 mark. Kindle Touch or Kobo Touch. Take your pick.

Any ereader that's 4 or 5 years old is going to have a battery that's approaching the end of its life.

And all of the older ereaders are going to be slower than the new ones.

And the new ones have nicer screens, and more storage, and are probably running better firmware.

And, presumably, the vendors of the old ones are selling them for some reason or another...that may or may not be because they are knackered.

And the new one will be prettier, with no scratches, mould, petrified drool or snot.

So, you might save $40 or $50 buying an old one. I just don't see the cost benefit in it.

YMMV

i'm too cheap (or too smart) to pay new prices for 1980's technology. though good point on the drool-n-snot. i'd have to factor in an extra $3 for disinfecting wipes...

i currently have tablets and a 6" kobo glo, so a kindle would just round out the collection of tools.

speed is not something i care much about - really, i spend more time reading a page than flipping though pages like those video review sites. whether a page-turn takes 0.4sec or 1.1sec is really irrelevant, since it takes me well over 100sec to actually read the page.

[jbcohen]

I am going to differ with what has been said before me for the simple reason that the Kindle non-touch is older then the basic and older hardware, in the previous 30 years that I have spent in IT (a fancy way of saying computers) has been that older hardware are more prone to failure. Also if the non-touch has been used before it's more prone to breakdowns. The new basic is right off the assembly lines and thus does not have the breakdown issues that the non-touch does.

[cutterjohn42]

Originally Posted by jbcohen

I am going to differ with what has been said before me for the simple reason that the Kindle non-touch is older then the basic and older hardware, in the previous 30 years that I have spent in IT (a fancy way of saying computers) has been that older hardware are more prone to failure. Also if the non-touch has been used before it's more prone to breakdowns. The new basic is right off the assembly lines and thus does not have the breakdown issues that the non-touch does.

I've only found that to be true primarily of mechanicals, e.g. drives, printers, keyboards, etc. and occasionally cap related, especially if cheap low quality electrolytics caps were used.

Most high quality Japanese caps have lasted 30+y and ceramic, well... they should last about as long as any other solid state chip. Hell when I was at the university we had 60y old high capacity electrolytic caps that were still functioning, but those were high quality american made.

Certainly most ICs are not just going to fail or they would have within the first few days of running, and generally within minutes of full powerup if not immediately.

Even with all of that it's more often than not a power problem(or someone fscked a software update and this is fixable) that takes out old electronics, and even then in many cases it's still just the psu(fixable), unless someone was really cheap and cut corners on psu isolation(probably not fixable).

Other than that, yeah your average china made stuff not made by a large company or closely supervised will be very low quality and prone to failure. Mostly because they won't use high quality parts and good design practices unless forced to.