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I Want a Kindle Killer
lpress (707742) writes "Amazon's Kindle is a good e-reader and they've sold around 40 million units, but it is far from perfect. It could be significantly improved with speech recognition for commands and text entry, a well-designed database for marginal notes and annotations, and integration with laptop and desktop computers. Google, Apple and Microsoft all have device design and manufacturing experience as well as stores that sell books and other written material. A Kindle-killing e-reader would be low-hanging fruit for Apple, Google or Microsoft — think of the competition if they each built one!"
Handwriting as an input method would be nice too; a friend in college had one of the experimental Windows XP tablet PCs, and it was great for note taking and document annotation.
great battery life, runs Android and is easy to root so you can do other stuff with it... I'd have added a keyboard on the back, for typing with fingers while holding it. Why not just make more of that?
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
"had one of the experimental Windows XP tablet PCs" Not experimental. They were all pen input devices and worked very well. Just ask Fujitsu and a bunch of others.
They're called "hammers."
How many features do you want to add to this before you kill it completely?
what he wants is everything and cheap, will not happen if it is not supported as kindle is by amazon that can sell it cheap because it lacks all those above
I believe that the Kindle is an excellent device primarily because it does one thing - its an eReader. I don't normally write all over my paper books and have no desire to do so on the Kindle either. Far from a luddite, I've got a ton of technology devices, but sometimes simple task-focussed pieces are better. My paperwhite is easy on the eyes, the battery lasts for a long time, its very lightweight, and I never have to troubleshoot it or wonder why its various components aren't playing well with each other.
Not every device needs to expand its footprint until all are equal. Want to read on a Fire or an iPad? Feel free. Don't try to turn the regular Kindle into a poor version of one of those.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
Why would I want speech recognition from a book? Or handwriting as input method?
The only thing I would want them to improve on the kindle is the speech output.
Please login to access my lawn
All I want is a paper replacement.
There are large e-ink displays, but they all lack high resolution input - as high as a 0.5mm pencil can get you.
15 years after I graduated, I still carry engineering paper, and I get it from the same bookstore. All that's changed is I take pictures of my notes instead of scan them now.
Come on Apple - want to innovate? Figure that one out. I triple dog dare you.
..don't panic
Because Kindles are cheap and Surface is not.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
While your suggestions speak to my inner geek, I think if Amazon does add those features they will kill the kindle.
That product sold 40 million because it does NOT have those features. It is already far more convenient than using a paperback, looks bright enough to read even in low light conditions, and can hold tons of books. For those 40 million people who bought a Kindle, that's more than enough. Add more features and you'll make the product cumbersome, suddenly it needs more processing power, suddenly battery life sucks...
No, I say the Kindle should remain as it is, and this simplicity is its strength.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain... time... to... die...
I have a kindle. I don't want it to be anything other than a book replacement. I don't want to input text, annotations (in fact I think ebooks are horrible for anything you would annotate, like a textbook- you need to be able to flip through those), or anything else. I care only about ease of reading the text and battery life (where it excels). If I wanted a tablet, I'd get a tablet.
About the only thing I'd want changed is faster page loading times and better tools for organizing books (list of authors and series, for example) that I've bought.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
I fail to see how the "features" discussed would make for a Kindle Killer. They sound like features that would cater to a niche of the population but little more than that. A Kindle Killer would need to find some sort of feature that when added to a book, makes it amazingly better. Not to mention, you've got to be able to do it for a price that makes it worthwhile.
... talking to your book to get it to do anything isn't likely to improve that.
If note taking in books was such a massively popular thing, we'd see more books with large margins for doing just that. Reading is a largely relaxing activity
What is being described here is more of a "goto E-reader" for research and/or students. Those aren't features I need when reading the latest novel. The notes or highlights I do take are minimal enough that I don't need anything too special, and certainly nothing that makes this the central aspect of my E-reader. Amazon did a pretty good job of understanding that people (the majority of readers at least) didn't want or need a ton of bells and whistles out of an e-reader. They needed something as similar to a book as possible. The book has been around for centuries and done a pretty good job, after all.
That's odd. Since in the last year I've read several novels, not to mention technical papers, essays and a few non-fiction books... all on my Nexus 7. Don't install much in the way of apps, and see no more ads on it than I do on my notebook or desktop.
Oh, I get it. You had this incredible attack against tablets, and you're not actually interested how they may be used on the ground. Do carry on with your biased and self-serving arguments.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
They're called tablets. :-P
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Ebook readers (the real ones based on e-ink) are good as they are. The less features the better, bookmarks and integration with vocabularies are enough for reading through a book.
If you need fancy stuff - get a tablet, it has features that you mentioned and much more.
Buck and Gerber make great knives. Far better than anything gillette has ever put out. So why don't they make a really great disposable razor so that they can corner the market?
Everyone rampaged around looking for an iPod killer and we never got one, until apple made the iphone, and popularized the convergence that everyone else had been trying to popularize in smartphones for years.
Samsung tried to make an iPhone killer, but could never really be successful without the true killer: Google Play/Android Marketplace
The iPod wasn't "the thing," iTunes was.
The Gillette Razor handle isn't "the thing" the cartridges are
The kindle isn't "the thing" the bookstore is.
Trying to beat the kindle with better hardware is completely missing the point. Even more so with the fact that Kindle has an app for most devices that lets you read stuff you buy from Amazon anyway (and vice versa).
The kindle is king because nobody (yes I am counting barnes and noble as "nobody") has any reason whatsoever to compete with it.
Because there is not much of a market for $400 e-reader.
Yep. I don't think the wife ever logs into the PC anymore, unless a site is so badly engineered she can't use it on the Nexus 7.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
They're called "tablets" and "tablet PCs".
What, you think handwriting recognition and voice recognition are cheap? That they're no-consequence modules that can be simply bolted on to another device that somehow, magically, doesn't impact cost, performance, battery life, or complexity of use? And that adding handwriting recognition to the e-reader app itself is easy? LOL. "Low-hanging fruit?" Hardly.
Do you REALLY think OEMs want to make yet ANOTHER class of device that fits between tablet computers and dedicated e-readers? How large do you think the market is for a device that does more than an e-reader and less than a tablet? It's already a pretty compact market space with razor-thin margins. The low-end for tablets (7"+) that aren't complete junk is about $99 and the high-end is $299. (8" iPad mini) Low-end tablet PC laptops start around there. (As will the Surface, on clearance, soon. :D ) Super-cheap tablets and dedicated e-readers go down to about $59. Don't look for another product category -- especially not one with such limited appeal -- to be squeezed into this narrow range any time soon.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
It's a book reader, only two things matter: screen quality and the ease of getting books on it.
I would've included battery life, but that's been a solved issue with the Kindle from the beginning.
None of the "killer" features listed would do a damn to improve the reading experience, and some of them would be very annoying. Didn't the whole Siri debacle finally demonstrate that no one wants to yell at their devices?
sic transit gloria mundi
The "paperwhite" backlighting on the latest Kindles is killer. I checked out the latest Nooks and they just aren't up to par as far as an even backlight is concerned.
The only multi-tasking ability I wish they would add (back) to the Kindle is the MP3 player/audio. I hate having to use a second device to listen to music while I'm reading and I miss the option of having an audio-book play while I'm cooking or such.
- tensions in our lives that are attacking our minds, unite themselves together to make our consciousness blind - op'ivy
I stopped reading on a full fledged tablet. It's not well readable in the sun, it requires charging all the time, and if the tablet breaks, it's expensive to replace.
I agree, the Kindle fire is an artificially crippled Android tablet anyway, so why not go with a better tablet? If you want just an e-ink based reader to do nothing else but read then some of the old Kindles might be OK. But if your looking for a Kindle Fire replacement then you don't have to look far to find better. I might have suggested the Nexus, but the customer unfriendly lack of a 5 cent memory card slot was a deal breaker for me. I would currently suggest the Hisense Sero 7 Pro 7" Tablet, available currently from Wak-Mart for $115. It has the resolution to be a great reader, a long life battery, And many tablet features that the Amazon offering lacks, including GPS, camera, NFC, and microphone. The only downside that I see is that it is only on Android 2.4, not the latest and greatest. But I think that still beats the Kindle.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
So, the answer to the "Kindle Killer" question is -- use a real tablet, not a book reader. They all have book reader apps and interface with desktops just fine. I don't use voice input because I don't choose to announce to everyone within earshot what I am doing. I think I've seen handwriting input for them, but I'm not big on trying to do small precise actions on a touch screen.
lpress wants a Kindle, but with "speech recognition for commands and text entry, a well-designed database for marginal notes and annotations, and integration with laptop and desktop computers."
That's not a Kindle, which is a single-purpose machine for reading; that is a general purpose machine. Apple already makes the machine desired: it's the iPad.
Handwriting as an input method would be nice too
Ah, now you're re-inventing the late lamented "Newton", not to mention the Palms of yesteryear (where the "handwriting" had to be in their unique graffiti alphabet)
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
I don't use voice input because I don't choose to announce to everyone within earshot what I am doing..
I am skeptical that the larger market cares about voice control at all. I like it for hands free phone dialing in the car, but that is about it. Its definitely important for those with disabilities, but otherwise voice control still seems more "gimmicky" than it is useful.
Converting from epub->mobi is not "lossy". It isn't like words or sections of text go missing during the conversion process.
My employers bought a couple of the Microsoft "Surface" boxes.
They got passed around, starting with the CEO, proceeding through around ten professional IT staff, and then through business middle management, then through the secretarial staff. Each of these users decided that the surface was not meeting their needs and gave it back, and we gave it to the next starry-eyed patsy.
Now they sit in a drawer in the IT support room, and every time some new hire comes in we ask them if they'd prefer a conventional laptop or the surface. Unless they've already used one, they always ask for the surface and use it for anywhere from one week to three months, then give it back and ask for a cheaper, more powerful laptop. These people come from all kinds of backgrounds but the response is always the same.
I only know of one real live person (as opposed to Internet commentators) who is productive with the Surface and loves it. She is a 20 year old art school student who also has a desktop PC and a windows phone. She proves that there is a niche for the device... but it appears that it's a very small one, and may be restricted to graphic artists.
When I used one for two months I found it to be an awkward compromise between a pad computer and a laptop, providing no real benefit over either one. Personally, I particularly hated the keyboard (although I liked the magnetic attachment schtick).
As a paperwhite owner, my device is almost always in airplane mode. Load books on it via Calibre over a USB cable and charge it every couple weeks. A modest investment of time and effort will thorougly break the "vice-like grip on the content" you referenced, but probably not for your father.