Kindle and gadgets

Kindle and Amazon seem to be getting a lot of people excited. They have sold out of the current batch of Kindles. In a lot of ways I can understand why. It looks like it's easy to use, a good size and with extra storage could hold a lot of books / documents. The ability to use the mobile phone network to get the books you're interested in is interesting! It seems to be easy to read. The items you chose from Amazon are listed in their / your library on Amazon so you can download them again if you need to.

The problems as I see them are only able to connect in America, no images, limited storage space and limited functionality. Adding an extra memory card is useful, but it doesn't solve most of the problems.

Some years ago there was so much touting of the idea that in general 'the people' didn't want several gadgets for several functions. One gadget was wanted that could do everything. This pushed a rash of development into the UMPC and some of those are pretty wonderful. They didn't take off in a big way. You can still get an ultra mobile but they don't appear in the shops as such and they are quite expensive. Every one of them that came out always seemed to miss out on one thing, whether it was the ability to make phone calls or something to do with connectivity, for example you could do wifi but not bluetooth (or the other way round). And sometimes the amount of storage just isn't inspirational. I can't see the point of getting an ultra mobile with 20 or 40 GB when my music player had 40 and I'd filled up 11 by the time it died. If I'm getting more functionality I want more storage.

A lot of people didn't like doing general computing on such a small screen. As I still haven't had such a small form factor in my hands to play with I can't give an opinion on that. I tried reading text on my music player but that was so small I ended up getting eye strain.

I'm one of the people who still wants one great gadget. I want everything including phone, camera, internet general computing, images and video, music, books, organising, decent storage and probably more on one device. I can't justify it yet. I keep an eye on the devices as they come out but the ones that seem to be getting close to what I want are very expensive. I already have a phone and access to a (fantastic) digital camera, a pc at home and I can buy a laptop for Aus$6-700 so why would I spend over Aus$2000 for something else ... that probably won't satisfy in the end. I feel quite pessimistic. At the very least I'll probably end up with the latest windoze and have to wipe it and load linux, and as such a huge part of the expense for these gadgets is the dozy operating system it feels like a waste of money. And knowing linux and the general idea that it always copes best with hardware at least six months old I may not get it to work properly anyway. At least for 6 months. And I'm not knowledgeable enough to write the drivers and programs I'd need.

So, probably for the next few years, I'll have a basic phone, access to a great camera, a pc at home that I've built myself, and a laptop that I can use for music, video, reading, organising myself and general computing. I will do internet either on the laptop when I'm out or on my pc at home. I can sync my organising with the pc, laptop and pc at work. At least with a handy usb stick. I'll make phone calls with my basic phone. Take photos and load them onto each computer as I want. Use the computers as backup for each other... Could be worse - I could be using a PDA as well.......................................