Kindle is getting out of reach

Just when I thought Amazon would improve the Kindle and make the price and looks more palatable, which is common sense anyway in this climate, they put out something even more out of reach. I like the larger screen, which makes reading easier than on my iPhone but that's about it. What about touch screen? Color?(nice to see pictures/illustration/graph/charts etc in full color, no?) And how about just making it look COOL, instead of this white chunky slab that resembles more a netbook. Hell, even a netbook looks better. And to shell out US$489 for it? Hello?

NEW YORK/SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Amazon.com Inc introduced a larger, souped-up Kindle electronic reader on Wednesday designed for students and newspaper readers, but a $489 price tag could make it too expensive for many consumers.

The Kindle DX, which has a 9.7 inch black-and-white display, is designed to be a more friendly vehicle for textbooks and newspapers, which often need a larger space to display their content effectively. The DX has about 2.5 times the surface area of the normal Kindle and costs $130 more.....

....And while it has a less-cluttered layout than the average computer screen and is easier on the eyes than a monitor, the DX provides little of the interactivity that people get on other hand-held devices. It does not offer color or touch-screen.

Super-sizing the Kindle also appears to ignore consumers' fascination with pocket-size gadgets such as Apple Inc's iPod and iPhone.

"It seems like you're fighting the impulse among consumers to go to smaller, more portable ways of acquiring media, such as an iPhone or a netbook," said Alan Mutter, a technology venture capitalist and former newspaper editor who runs the newspaper business blog Reflections of a Newsosaur....

...Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Boston Globe will start pilot programs with the DX this summer. He said five universities will do pilot programs with the reader acting as an all-in-one textbook.

The DX also allows people to read personal documents, and is touted as a way for businesspeople and others to avoid having to carry around an assortment of loose papers.

Besides making highly formatted pages easier to read, the DX has more memory, 3.3 gigabytes, which can hold up to 3,500 books versus the normal Kindle's 1,500.

But at $489, analysts questioned how many economy-conscious consumers would open their wallets for the new gadget, which weighs nearly 19 ounces.

"It is somewhat ironic in that the device is getting more expensive as the source content that is well-suited to it is becoming more mass-market such as newspapers and textbooks," said Ross Rubin, consumer technology analyst at the NPD Group...

via Reuters

I am still going to put off buying it. But if Amazon can take a leaf from Apple's book, Kindle will lead e-readers to change the game in the print industry the way Apple's products did to music.