Kindle on Smartphones Heralds The First Mainstream Ebook Success
Published by Ewan Spence at 13:17 UTC, March 5th 2009
Amazon's portable ebook reader, the Kindle, is in its second hardware iteration, and has now expanded out from the dedicated reader into a software platform. At the moment the Kindle and the Apple iPhone are the only devices in the ecosystem, but you have to expect more platforms to join the party. Here's why.
Ebooks have been 'the next big thing' since the PDA explosion in the late nineties, and while there were many users that were happy to read from a 160x160 Palm screen, or the 480x160 screen on the Psion Series 3a's, the prevailing opinion was that nobody would read a full novel from a tiny screen. While there may have been tens of thousands of sad PDA geeks people ready to prove the opposite, the romantic notion of an electronic book remained just that for many years.
But that time has let ebooks grow quietly, and for technology to catch up with the promise. The Kindle is one of many ebook readers (Sony had a rather nice one last year as well) on the hardware front, but it is the one that has managed to catch popular opinion in the last year.
And I think that is because people look at Amazon and think “books” and that gave the regular “man in the street” (as opposed to the Geek brigade) confidence that they would be able to get modern books on their devices. While Mobipocket has been doing sterling service for the PDA and Smartphone community with continual software releases for a range of devices, with modern publishers providing content to the service, it remained (and I mean this in the best possible way) a niche service. And, now that Amazon owns Mobipocket, we can perhaps expect this product to gradually fade into the background...
I'd also argue that only having the Kindle hardware kept Amazon's service also in a niche, but one that was more like an expanding balloon, with more people recognising the possibility of the service. Couple that feel with a growing appetite for digital text, be it ebooks, newspapers, or RSS feeds, and the Kindle proved the market.
It's highly unlikely that Amazon will stop at the iPhone, and I'd expect other handheld devices to come soon. Given the US focus, I would think that Windows Mobile to be considered before S60, but the sheer volume of S60 devices out there, especially in the European market makes it look like an open goal for Amazon.
Now, with the ability to run on third party hardware in the armoury; a wide range of modern books; and an easy purchase system so everyone in the industry gets a good slice of the pie, I'm fully expecting the ebook revolution to get a huge head of steam.
-- Ewan Spence, March 2009.
Categories: Software
Platforms: General
News Discussion
The N97 and Omnia HD should start to move those reasons back towards S60 in the future, though.
The problem is that the screen is still too small, and it'll absolutely decimate the battery life.
The killer punch for a Kindle (or the Sony PRS505), is that they have decent dimensioned high resolution screens that are capable of being read of hundreds of hours without a recharge - try that with a smartphone.
When I've spent time fiddling around with my 2nd gen Ipod Touch, I don't think I've had more than 3 hours before I need to recharge it.
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Originally Posted by JCB_Digger
Iain - you might get 15 hours out of an Iphone when it spends most of it's time in your pocket, but I honestly doubt you'll get anything near that with the screen on all the time and you're "turning" pages.
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The iPhone has a better battery-life than my N95 8GB, and almost as good as my E90 (in some cases better - like music and movie playback).
Even with browsing the web over 3G and full backlight, Wi-Fi on and BT off (Coz lets be serious, what would I use it for?) I can easily get about 5-6 hours of browsing from my 3G, with the backlight down or off that number only grows.
Only time I've had terrible battery life is browsing over Wi-Fi or playing hardware intensive games on the system :-)
Reading an eBook doesn't drain the battery at all (Well, not as much as anything else anywhoo) and you'd be surprised at how well the battery holds up, and again cranking down the backlight will only improve the battery usage :-)
These battery life claims are almost as bad as the "It needs 2 hands to operate!!11" claims ;-)
a) no newspapers or magazine subscriptions
b) can't buy books directly from the app
It's unclear if the app was crippled to favor the Kindle II, or to make the app compliant with Apple store policies (no store inside the store, no heavy 3D data traffic). If the former, the same limitations will apply to a future S60 version; if the latter, there's the hope that the S60 app will be functionally equal to the Kindle. Regardless, I'm looking forward to using it on an Omnia HD, taking advantage of the larger (less eyestrain), OLED (lower power consumption) screen; and, of course, of the user-replaceable battery.
(in between muffled sounds of a hat being eaten)
I grabbed Stanza last night on my fully charged Ipod, turned off the wifi, and cranked the brightness back to around 20%.
This morning after around 10 hours it was complaining about low battery, but still working, so I was talking out of my arse - sorry. :redface:
The reading experience wasn't half as bad as I was expecting either, I had to hold the Ipod a little closer to my face than I normally would for reading, but it'd certainly pass an hour or so.