You would think I would know better than to be an early adopter by now. Early adopters are people who buy things — usually electronic gadgets — the minute they are released. The upside to being an early adopter is that, well, you get to play with technology before other people. The downsides, however, are many. <\/p>\n

Early adopters are often treated as beta testers. The first people to buy gadgets are usually the first people to find its flaws, flaws that are often fixed later in the product’s life. That leaves the people who ponied up money early on with an unsellable, inferior product. (Don’t forget that products tend to drop in price the longer they remain on the market; the people buying next year’s version will get a better product for less money!)<\/p>\n

The Kindle 2 went on sale the last week of February, 2009. I had mine in my hands and had already posted a review by the first week of March. This week (the first week of May), Amazon has announced a “bigger, better Kindle.”<\/p>\n

Thanks a lot, Amazon.<\/p>\n

The new model — the Kindle DX — fixes two complaints most owners of the Kindle and Kindle 2 have. First, the unit is bigger. Physically it’s about the size of a standard spiral notebook, thickness and all. No more reading eBooks on a 3×5 screen; the screen on the Kindle DX measures 9.7 inches diagonally. The second complain many Kindle\/Kindle 2 owners was that converted files (such as PDF files) often didn’t display correctly. The Kindle DX displays PDF files natively. Good for them … bad for me.<\/p>\n

Amazon snuck a few surprises in their announcement as well, both good and bad. The Kindle DX will feature a rotating screen to make some content easier to read. Despite earlier rumors of a touch screen, the Kindle DX features regular, run-of-the-mill buttons.<\/p>\n

The biggest surprise of all is that the Kindle DX will list for $489. Amazon customers (including myself) went nuts over the Kindle 2’s retail price of $359, so I can’t wait<\/i> to see what they say about a new unit, three months later, that’s $130 more. Then again, the general consensus is that the DX isn’t intended for us. Amazon is in talks with several newspapers and colleges about getting newspapers, magazines and college textbooks delivered to the DX. At $489 plus media costs, it’s already been reported that getting the New York Times for a year electronically will cost more than it would to just have the paper edition delivered to your front door.<\/p>\n

That sounds like a case of gouging early adopters, if you ask me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You would think I would know better than to be an early adopter by now. Early adopters are people who buy things — usually electronic gadgets — the minute they are released. The upside to being an early adopter is that, well, you get to play with technology before other people. The downsides, however, are many. Early adopters are often treated as beta testers. The first people to buy gadgets are usually the first people to find its flaws, flaws that are often fixed later in the product’s life. That leaves the people who ponied up money early on with… (read more)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1444","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1444","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1444"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1444\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}