Comments on: Will Amazon’s Kindle Ever Have a Decent Browser?

By: David

David — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 00:47:52 +0000

Vocabulary mavens to world: "loose" and "lose" are two different words.

By: MR

MR — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 10:26:36 +0000

Kevin, Sadly not one of your best or most relevant articles. It's a shame you can't press delete after you publish.

By: Zigzagjoe

Zigzagjoe — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 00:45:30 +0000

The processor isn't the problem. If anything, it's incredibly powerful for the demands of image-less web browsing. At one point, I was using elinks on a zipit (embedded linux device, 16mb ram, 77mhz arm7) and it worked fine. Zippy, etc (excuse the pun) - it took more time to type in the URL on the little keyboard.

Image-rendering would increase the load somewhat but not to the point where any sort of power-hogging graphics chip would be necessary.

The main bottleneck is (likely) that this browser is written in java, rendering what should be (and could be) very quick into something slow as molasses. I don't think driver for the epson eink support chip is necessarily written the best, either.

The eink display does slow things down, but not as much as the piss-poor rendering speed. Synchronously loading the images is also very poor design, ended up with a relatively horrid browsing experience.

E-ink will never play videos worth watching anytime soon. But the browser itself, for viewing the non-richmedia content which is most of the web, can be vastly improved.

By: Scotty

Scotty — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 22:34:21 +0000

If you'd popped for the Kindle DX when it came out you'd have had a better browser as well as the larger screen to enjoy it with. :-)

By: netwiz

netwiz — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:33:40 +0000

I'm not sure what you mean by that exactly, but if your talking about how much the kindles connection costs the answer to that is nothing, to the consumer. Amazon has partnered with (at&t?) the telco to make buying books on the kindle wirelessly over 3G completely free... although there may be some sort of upfront cost.

By: SAM

SAM — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:14:28 +0000

Not until it has a color screen

By: Schorschi

Schorschi — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 19:10:46 +0000

So, what's up with cheaper mobile Internet service anyway? Is $60 the bottom of the rung? The iPad is supposed to come with $15 with cap and $30 a month with unlimited traffic. Sounds cheaper to me than $60.

By: TateJ

TateJ — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 18:18:31 +0000

Amazon has a great device in the kindle reader. I hope they don't mess it up by trying to turn it into an iPad type device. They will loose that fight unless they design a new Kindle from scratch.