4th March 2009

Innovative TV Remote

Innovative new TV remote control featured on CNET.

posted in Technology | 1 Comment

4th March 2009

Kindle for iPhone

Various blogs are all in an uproar over the Kindle iPhone app and whether this is a good idea or not. I’m going to come down on the “very good idea” side and say that this makes me more likely to get a Kindle (and more importantly invest in the Kindle eco-system by buying some content).

The big issue for me is the profusion of devices. I don’t want to carry around a phone, a music player, a book reader and a laptop. One of the things I really like about my iPhone is that it acts as a good music player so I can just carry one device.

Having said that the form factor of a given device isn’t perfect for every situation. I downloaded the Kindle app to my phone and tried it out and it was very well done (I got the sample first chapter of the new Neil Stephenson book), but it seemed like it would be a painful way to read a whole book. The key thing is that the iPhone app and device both sync the same books and can share the place you left off reading + bookmarks. So if I were to buy a Kindle device I’d end up of course getting content for it, but if I left it behind I could still do a little light reading from anywhere which is a really cool scenario.

The other angle behind giving away the software of course is that Amazon is presumably more motivated by getting people to invest in their content than in selling the actual devices. Apple has done an amazing job getting their device COGS down so that they make a profit off $199 iPhones, but Amazon is much newer to the hardware space and were at least implying that they can’t sell for much more than the $359 without losing money. But it doesn’t take that many $10 digital books to turn into real money and if their free iPhone app gets you to spend a bunch of money and locks you into your Amazon digital library, they win too. From that perspective it would make sense for them to make a PC version too- if I could read real books on a normal Windows tablet that would probably push me over the edge for sure.

posted in Business, Technology | 0 Comments