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How a Leather Cover Crashes the Kindle

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the still-no-antennagate dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Amazon has started offering refunds to Kindle owners who own the unlit leather case who claim that it causes their Kindles to reboot, but are playing dumb on the cause: "our engineering team is looking into this." People have been wondering how a leather cover could possibly crash an electronic device, and why is Amazon offering money back if they don't think there's a problem? It seems that some of the folks over at Connectify have figured it out, and it's a doozy!"

8 of 280 comments (clear)

  1. Yikes! by Iphtashu+Fitz · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Wow. That's a pretty major design flaw.

    1. Re:Yikes! by microcars · · Score: 4, Insightful

      not owning a Kindle I don't understand why there is even a need to have the two "hooks" connected in any way by a piece of conductive material.
      They are not powering a lamp, they just keep the Kindle attached to the leather case.

      --
      I like microcars
    2. Re:Yikes! by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The flaw is certainly in the cover(using two physically separated hooks, rather than a single piece of metal, would not have been rocket surgery and would have provided dielectric strength high enough to resist pretty much any voltage that wouldn't also kill the user.) However, we really have no way of knowing whether the cover maker failed to follow amazon's orders, whether amazon failed to issue the correct orders, or who was responsible for considering the situation where the + hook and the - hook are not separated by an LED and current limiting resistor.

      If amazon didn't think about it, or naively thought that a thin layer of cheap paint would do, they fucked up. If the cover maker looked at a design document that said "Connecting hooks must be electrically separate" and said "eh, one painted part is cheaper than two physically disconnected parts, paint'll do." then they fucked up.

    3. Re:Yikes! by biryokumaru · · Score: 5, Insightful

      If you RTFA, you'll see the hooks are totally different. You're in the right vein, though. The unlit case looks like it uses a single strip of cut metal for the attachment hooks, a pretty simple design, and much cheaper than making hooks that aren't shorts.

      My guess is the only reason they're painted black is because they were aware of this problem and thought that would fix it good and cheap. Or the paint is simple corrosion prevention and they didn't know...

      --
      When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
  2. Something we need more of by QuantumBeep · · Score: 3, Insightful

    We constantly hear about needing to "program defensively" and test for "can't happen" conditions.

    Here's one for defensive engineering.

  3. 2 ohm is not a ahort circuit. by MatanZ · · Score: 2, Insightful

    If it connects directly to the battery at about 4V, it will only draw 2A, or 8W. This should be enough to warm the case, but not to make it or the device burst into flames.

  4. And also break off. by maillemaker · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Plastic has the virtue of being non-conductive, but my guess is that such a tiny part made in plastic could be problematic in terms of strength.

    --
    A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
  5. You overlook something we've discussed here... by DragonWriter · · Score: 3, Insightful

    How exactly do you fry an ebook?

    A demonstration for you:
    1) Purchase Kindle
    2) Purchase and download 1000 ebooks to Kindle
    3) Throw kindle into incinerator
    4) Purchase new Kindle and click "Sync"
    5) 1000 ebooks "magically" appear on new kindle and more remarkable show no signs of fire damage.

    1000 minus, of course, the number of those ebooks that Amazon has decided can no longer be downloaded since the time they were downloaded into the old Kindle. Now, depending on how your tastes in ebooks line up with Amazon's whims in maintaining their public interest, that difference might be zero, or 1000, or anywhere in between.