Why I think the Amazon App Store will be a better deal for developers | Hacker News Reader

Why I think the Amazon App Store will be a better deal for developers

loufranco.com

28 pointsloumf13 comments

I'm having trouble thinking of what apps I'd want for the kindle. When I have it, I'm "reading mode" as just want to read my book.

The screen is 16-color greyscale and refreshes slowly (for apps); I'm having trouble thinking of what app would be better on a kindle than an iPhone. The screen size is the only real advantage I see. I'd love to proven wrong, but I just don't see the Kindle store taking off.

I'm imagining more stuff that you'd read -- content rather than apps.

I can see crosswords and similar games taking off for people who use their kindle to read newspapers. It's one of the major (to some people) sections missing from the kindle versions right now.

I think we could also see apps that use the kindle as a tool for producing content, not just consuming it. Writing blog posts, kindle twitter apps, etc. The keyboard leaves something to be desired, but I could still see this type of thing being popular.

Basically, the successful apps won't be competing with what you see on the iphone, they'll be unique to the device.

tool for producing content

I wrote a four-line HN comment from my Kindle the other day, because my cell phone ran out of batteries. It was excruciating. T H E L E tters appeared one at a time with enough of a pause in between them that even with the non-standard layout of the keyboard I had queued up two sentences and then had to wait for literally 45 seconds while my Kindle caught up to me.

The thought of writing a substantive blog post on the Kindle scares me.

They won't be unique to the device. The iPhone already has crosswords, writing apps, twitter apps, sudoko apps, etc.

The only things unique about Kindle apps will be the slightly larger screen, lack of animation, lack of color, and lack of unlimited data transfer.

Look at the max data rate, its so low it is per month

100k isn't much -- even per month. John Gruber says the Daring Fireball feed is 36k zipped.

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/01/22/kindle-free-wire...

Because of the millions upon millions of Kindle users waiting for the apps ? I have yet to see a Kindle in real-life but I saw iPhones way before they were officially launched in Europe. And there are shops selling iPod Touch all over the place.

Did you read the article? It seems to address this point at the end: This isn’t to say that Kindle will beat Apple in any quantifiable way (number of apps, number of downloads, number of customers, etc), but I think that the kinds of stories of real businesses being built on the Kindle store will be quite different from the lottery that the iPhone app market appears to be.

Has anyone seen more info on the SDK? Any real info at all?

There isn't anything official. The Kindle has been hacked so we know that it runs Linux, has a JVM and a bunch of obfuscated jars which look like the actual Kindle software. Because of the GPL, Amazon has to release all of their patches to the distro that they're using, but I don't think anyone has found anything useful from that.

How is the keyboard on the Kindle?

I have a DX and I don't really like the keyboard all that much, my main gripe being that you can't lock it into numeric mode. So say if you want to go to a specific page number or location 123, instead of just typing 123 you have to type alt-1, alt-2,alt-3 (or at least hold down the alt key). Other than that, the keyboard is about as useful as any mobile phone type keyboard - which for me means entry is quite slow.

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