Amazon Kindles with 3G will start to lose cellular network access in December
theverge.com
theverge.com
Everything passed via an http proxy, with a key that could be easily extracted from the Kindle via SSH.
The SIM worked globally - I'd used it in China, Iran, Iraq, etc - all sorts of places that normally are not covered by providers.
At some point others must have abused the system, because the unlimited data got capped to 150MB a month, but in a pinch, it was an incredible tool.
Ditto with first generation Lime scooters that had unlocked global twillio SIMs ...
His entire intern project was a small piece of the system being built to detect abuse of these SIMs and stop it. Given it's a decade later now, I doubt it still works or works for very long.
For the Lime SIMs, there was a day when the pipe was turned off - I can imagine it was the day someone looked into their twillio billing in detail..
I'd rather work for another evil corporation like Mac Donalds than work to remove features from devices people have already bought. When your company is selling surveillance tools to individuals masquerading as e-book readers and you have to struggle to just install a libre Operating System, it's not even close to fair that you get to use the SIM card Amazon planted in your device in whichever way you please.
Alice: "Don't work for Foo vineyard. Foo vineyard puts poison in the wine that people buy without them knowing it." Bob: "Just don't buy Foo's wine yourself, then." (Millions of people are still being poisoned drinking Foo wine and would probably buy a different wine if they were informed about it.)
However, if you morally object to anyone purchasing Amazon's Kindle on the basis of surveillance capitalism, I'm not sure if arguing over limiting data use with their SIM cards is the best use of your energy.
They're arguing 'I bought a product which doesn't offer feature X and I'm mad that it turns out it can't do X'. Use your common sense. Buy a product that explicitly does have X if you want X.
People ask why do right to repair laws need to exist despite John Deere having thousands of competitors for tractors? Similarly, the market for e-readers and smart phones should allow limitless competition.
How many e-readers companies could negotiate great terms for e-ink displays and world wide 3g coverage? If any of them did, might Amazon automatically get their negotiated best price as part of the clauses Amazon could negotiate given it has most of the volume?
If Amazon and Sony get the best price on e-ink displays, Amazon and b&n on US networks, and Amazon and Kobo on European networks, who is actually competing with Amazon to sell an ereader with world wide coverage?
So you paid money for the product. The product is technically capable to fulfill your greatest needs and desire as someone who purchased it, yet it has built-in mechanisms to enforce the will of someone else on your life.
Would you find it normal to have screws sold with Ikea furniture that are made so that they can only screw Ikea furniture? Or gasoline sold with a BMW car that only works in BMW cars? Or bread sold with a butter that can only go on that kind of bread? It makes no sense, as interoperability is a fundamental property of most things around us, going against that is an insult and an injury to all of humanity, and to our planet that's ever more polluted because our overlords have decided we should keep on producing and throwing away hardware instead of repairing/re-purposing things as we used to not long ago.
As long as that's how the product was described or agreed when I bought it, then I think that's moral.
Kindles aren't sold with the feature of being able to remove the SIM and use it separately. If that's what you want... buy a different product.
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106989...
Do you see the absurdity of your argument? It makes perfect sense to criticize something you find profoundly unethical even when you're not directly concerned by the situation.
It's a bit like when Facebook wanted to bring "Internet" into countries where bandwidth is expensive, by branding unlimited access to Facebook as "Internet". Having access to the network should give you full access to the network (net neutrality). Having acquired hardware should give you full access to put your own system (right to repair).
It's only logical that if you paid for a device, and some money of that went into providing you free Internet services, you get to do what you want with both the device and the Internet access and Amazon should have no control over what you do because they CHOSE to sell that to you in an attempt to exploit your attention and control what you can read. That relation was abusive to start with, and that some people find little benefits in it does not bother me from an ethical perspective.
Seriously, though, great comment!
I'd found it to be invaluable solving the after-landing-before-you-have-a-local-SIM conundrum.
It wasn't a Kindle, but another country's prepaid SIM that I continued using while in Japan. Phone companies in Japan don't do prepaid: only phone rentals by the day, or 2 year subscriptions. Neither of those were suitable for the 2 months I lived there.
Some international SIM cards would run out of balance and send an SMS as a warning. But others would redirect me to a topup page. Let's just say that wasn't the only page that was available, and the "send this page to a friend" email function is very convenient when Japanese phones have incoming email addresses for sending email-to-SMS.
Google calendar used to be a great way to get free email-to-RSS-to-SMS notifications, but that shut down a couple of years ago unfortunately.
In case you ever go back: https://www.bmobile.ne.jp/english/
I've used this on several trips and it works well.
Unless of course you were living there more permanently, in which case the above is not useful.
With my current prepaid SIM, I typically top up $5 every 3 months. Between iMessage, WhatsApp/WeChat/KakaoTalk/Skype/Facebook, free incoming calls, and the occasional emergency SMS, I usually don't need a phone. People don't like it when I don't have a local number though.
That's cheaper than most plans in any country, let alone roaming.
Yes, I pay per minute for outgoing calls, or MB of usage - and those costs are high. That's why I try to use WiFi whenever possible, and use offline maps, offline Wikipedia, etc.
Prepaid data (sans voice/SMS) have been easily accessible at reasonable prices for at least 6 years; they are now ubiquitous and can be bought at electronics stores, airports, and the occasional convenience store.
These days the 2y term requirement only applies when you get a plan with a subsidized smartphone or pocket wifi. Though you still need (IIRC) 6 month min on your stay for any subscription, so prepaid or rental is the only way if you stay for shorter. High-speed LTE data is cheap and available but SMS/voice is nigh impossible for non-long-term-residents (which is extra problematic given how practically everything/everyone in Japan assume you can provide a Japanese voice number they can call, and LINE does age verification through your mobile provider).
Seriously, what's the problem with that? That model had a basic web browser, so it was basically designed to be used this way. I used it in emergency situations (without taking the card out) for checking email and the like. It was slow and clumsy, but it worked. It would not occur to me that since I'm abroad I'm doing something wrong because the device was actually advertised as having global Internet connectivity, and it was one of the reasons I bought it.
If anything it's to be applauded that "global" really meant global, not just "yeah global as long as you're in USA, CA, UK, EU, AU, NZ." So many times my "global" MasterCard did not work in some whole country.
Nearly every country in the world has at least one mobile network that has a roaming agreement with Deutsche Telekom. They have negotiated rates at high volumes in the cents/GB regardless of local pricing shenanigans.
DT is often the local cell providers gateway for international calling, so they have quite a bit of leverage.
- Set up the sim before you leave. It's the worst trying to do it once you land. (Ask me how I know)
- You will get some interesting networks, but I've never had problems with them.
- I think they just fixed it on iOS, but be prepared to type in the details manually (not hard, just not seamless) because they expect you to scan a QR code???
Even with those quirks, it's been great, simple, no problems, and I've used in US/UK/Australia.
https://www.theverge.com/2013/10/9/4821692/t-mobile-announce...
Just a regular prepaid SIM card, no strings attached. If you use it for just 1 month, no problem, just don't top it up. The SIM itself costs 10€.
This is far from the norm though, this company basically undercut everyone else and they had to lower their prices. The fun part is that they're actually better than most because they don't try to charge you random fees every few months.
They sell you a hotspot that works in 80+ countries with an eSIM. When you land you top up 500 MB of that countries data for a few dollars, which is usually enough to get me to the hotel and then out to a shop where locals buy SIMs. Depending on the device they have 1-2 extra SIM slots and you an hot swap between them.
There is an upfront cost and it doesn't quite meet your price point - but it gives you the flexibility to do a bit more shopping past airport rates.
But hopefully starlink will help drive prices down once they enable mesh communication.
There lies the problem; UDP traffic could still flow freely. Yes, that included OpenVPN (WireGuard hadn't been invented yet). I never really abused this, but someone must've, as when I checked a month later, activation was strictly handled through phone calls; previously-used SIM cards no longer received any type of LTE service.
It was a lot easier to not actually use the internet then though, as it was 10-15 years ago. The last time I was on a cruise, 3-4 years ago I think, I bought the wifi package, and it was so poorly implemented and/or overloaded that it was a pain at best to use. All things considered, not usually an issue when you're relaxing, but when you need it for a moment and it feels like you're using an old 3G connection, that sucks.
It was also possible to SSH from the Kindle, over its 3G connection.
So the SIM card could be kept in the Kindle, to be used as originally intended. But also (in an emergency) to use a few KB of data anywhere in the world for SSH.
I was very careful to use <1 MB of data - as this use case isn't quite what the Kindle was designed for, probably. :-)
From memory, broad steps were:
- Root (jailbreak) the Kindle, and sideload "USB Networking" (to allow tethering - i.e., connect the Kindle to a computer via USB, and the computer would share the Kindle's Internet connection)
- Read the magic key (which the HTTP proxy required) - it was sitting in a plaintext file within /var/local/ so could be easily read after rooting the Kindle
- Run an SSH server on the HTTPS port (TCP/443), then use proxytunnel to connect via the HTTP proxy server - https://github.com/proxytunnel/proxytunnel (proxytunnel has an option to pass an arbitrary HTTP header containing the magic key)
EDIT: This isn't me, but looks like I wasn't the only person to SSH from the Kindle. https://studylib.net/doc/5580927/kindle
"Amazon’s Kindle e-readers with built-in 3G will begin to lose the ability to connect to the internet on their own in the US in December, according to an email sent to customers on Wednesday. The change is due to mobile carriers transitioning from older 2G and 3G networking technology to newer 4G and 5G networks. For older Kindles without Wi-Fi, this change could mean not connecting to the internet at all."
We were surprised that it even had enough signal to figure out the GPS cords.
Even back then cell coverage was not as good as it is now. So many times it was 'go stand at the end of your driveway and try'.
Like my dad's house in Maine today :-)
In the early years of the iPhone in the US, there was--including on this site I imagine--much wailing and gnashing of teeth over AT&T's coverage.
edit: What I find interesting is that the things had location tracking built in and no one blinked an eye.
It did open up some very interesting homebrew applications too!
Also the early models with WiFi had the absolute worst radios and constantly tripped over themselves. When I worked for Centurylink in/around 2011 one of the most common issues with wifi was Kindle devices. Thankfully most customers could figure that if their 3-5 other devices were connected and working, the issue was their Kindle, and not the CPE.
But if you actually needed a working network connection in the press room, you plugged an Ethernet cable into your laptop.
As much to the point, Amazon was also very much aiming for the use case of the business traveler who wanted to buy a book before hopping on the plane in an airport that probably didn't have WiFi and almost certainly didn't have free WiFi.
I won't say 2007 was the stone ages. But a lot of things we mostly just take for granted today didn't exist or were relatively nascent.
The big selling point of the first Kindle was the idea that you could access the store to download stuff anywhere. WiFi wasn’t ubiquitous like it is now (and even now, it isn’t as ubiquitous as I think we all would have hoped), which made having a free 2G connection really nice, especially when outdoors in areas that the E Ink display really shined.
For customers with Kindle (1st Generation), Amazon is offering a free Kindle Oasis (10th Generation) device and cover.
Customers with Kindle (1st and 2nd Generation), Kindle DX (2nd Generation), and Kindle Keyboard (3rd Generation) can receive $70 off a new Kindle Paperwhite or Kindle Oasis, plus $25 in ebook credits.
Customers with Kindle Touch (4th Generation), Kindle Paperwhite (5th Generation, 6th Generation, and 7th Generation), Kindle Voyage (7th Generation), and Kindle Oasis (8th Generation) can receive $50 off a new Kindle Paperwhite or Kindle Oasis, plus $15 in ebook credits.
That sounds like a fair deal to me. Although it’s pure speculation. I haven’t checked if that is actually the case.
...I'm actually quite confused as to why the people with the oldest devices—whose Kindles presumably had the longest usable life—are the only ones getting free replacements.
Maybe there is a lifetime clause in the AGBs? If they promised 15 years of usable time (for example), this might be their way to get out.
Also, the longest customers are probably the most loyal and bought a lot of books over the years, while also being the smallest subgroup.
And, now I'm kicking myself for dropping my 1st gen Kindle off at the e-waste recycler!
Clearly, a lot of people felt like the headline was misleading.
I remember thinking at the time that hacking these would make nice sensors to deploy in the field and that they could stay online for free, essentially. Kindle had a built-in web browser, so HTTP calls wouldn't be too hard to make.
Controversial HN opinion: ten years ago everyone would be up in arms about this change. Something happened. We no longer care about device obsolescence. It's like our concept of ownership and longevity has been stripped from us.
You stream music instead of owning it, you download games instead of owning physical copies, devices are locked down, you can't run software you want, and we tolerate devices no longer working after a certain date.
It's okay if things stop working, because they weren't meant to work forever. It's sad.
Broadly speaking, I absolutely agree. People are impressed that Apple supports 6-year-old iPhones, whereas I think that's an unconscionably short length of time. (Particularly given how Apple makes customers reliant on them for everything.)
However, in the case of these Kindles, I'm a bit more sympathetic to Amazon here. They're not the ones who are turning off 3G networks, so I'm not really sure what they could do.
For some reason, I didn't get one--probably because my device is no longer registered on Amazon.com. Not that I have any real reason to run out and buy a new Kindle anyway.
Also, there is a clear reason they are turning these off (dropping on 2G and 3G coverage) as opposed to companies that needlessly brick devices just because they turned off a easy-to-maintain DRM server somewhere without an alternative recourse.
That feature was quite nice while travelling as it got me free Wikipedia everywhere, which is nice to read up on sights etc.
I don’t think this is true at all. Ten years ago, we had already gone through the analog to digital transition in a number of countries [1], obsoleting a lot of older television sets without the aid of a converter box.
In the US, TDMA and AMPS cellular networks were shut down by 2008 (TDMA shutdown started even earlier), obsoleting tons of early cellular phones, but also many phones from the early 2000s (again, TDMA). People were often given vouchers by carriers IIRC, since phones were largely subsidized by rate plans.
DIVX, a terrible DVD rental scheme that helped put Circuit City out of business, went under by 1999, leaving the devices essentially worthless (fortunately, most did receive a firmware update allowing them to be used as regular DVD players).
I’m sure there were some grumbles about some of this stuff (people were very mad about TV, even though converters were given away for free), but it is largely accepted that progress obsoletes certain technologies. This isn’t new.
However there has been many more fights about turning of the FM signals, at least here in Denmark, mostly because people can't upgrade the radio in their cars easily but probably also because the new type of radio is a lot worse than FM. So now we have both.
I suspect that when/if they turn it of people won't get a new radio and will just play music from their phones.
I still think the major issue is our cars, the fleet is old because there is an extremely high tax on cars, and it isn't as easy to just upgrade the radios as it used to be - and of course with FM available (and as you said, better in many cases) there is no big incentive to update, although we have more channels available on DAB.
Headlines are hard.
I guess that's too tangential for this post, though.
Their LPs are somewhat fascinating to me in that they're publicly available and you can see how their actions fall into them. Well, save for "Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer."
They're very selective. Much of the Amazon web site is the opposite of customer obsession. I've yet to find a single person I know who agrees with their removing comments from reviews, for example.
Their search filtering is very poor as well.
> For customers with Kindle (1st Generation), Amazon is offering a free Kindle Oasis (10th Generation) device and cover.
> Customers with Kindle (1st and 2nd Generation), Kindle DX (2nd Generation), and Kindle Keyboard (3rd Generation) can receive $70 off a new Kindle Paperwhite or Kindle Oasis, plus $25 in ebook credits.
> Customers with Kindle Touch (4th Generation), Kindle Paperwhite (5th Generation, 6th Generation, and 7th Generation), Kindle Voyage (7th Generation), and Kindle Oasis (8th Generation) can receive $50 off a new Kindle Paperwhite or Kindle Oasis, plus $15 in ebook credits.
Sounds like you should qualify for the $70 + $25 credits. If you are actually considering it, I would contact Amazon if I were you. Personally I have the Kindle Keyboard and I'm not interested in the credit, I'm still happy with it and it still works fine. But I think it's great that they are offering it.
Plus, if you go to their site to buy a new Kindle it says you get $50 + 20% off if you trade in your old Kindle. Customer service told me I can't combine offers (plus trade in takes a couple weeks anyway) so it seems the $50 offer is worse than what normal customers get anyway.
It's no surprise that they want to keep that revenue stream alive.
Was wondering if I could get in on that, but I stopped using my 3G Kindles when they stopped holding charge.
Regardless, neither Amazon nor Nissan can help that another company turned off those frequencies. Amazon has demonstrated more foresight and better customer service, however.
And I say this as someone with two BMW motorcycles in the garage that we're pretty happy with.
Polestar, for example, has really hard nylon-like seats in their cars but are cramming a bunch of Google tech in it. Say what you will about Google, but it’s time to innovate beyond the infotainment system, and they actually seem to be doing that. Similarly, Teslas have had consistent quality issues and are ridiculously vendor-locked. The Model S drives nice but I haven’t heard great things about the Model 3, as least compared to other cars at its price point.
I’m actually pretty happy with Kia right now, their Niro EV is rather nice and they have a solid warranty on everything. The tech isn’t fascinating and Uvo (their connectivity service) is entirely unimpressive, but their cars seem to strike a good balance between the car and the tech without costing obscene amounts. The EV6 actually looks pretty exciting on both fronts too.
Ehhhhhhhhh I don't know about you guys, but I just slap in a new radio head unit myself and retrofit CarPlay via the aftermarket. I can hack CarPlay into a decent car, but I can't hack a decent car from one that prioritized CarPlay and interior RGB gamer lights over reliability and a decent ride.
By tech-forward I was more referencing things like mobile keys, connectivity, digital dash, HUD, etc.
Tesla is about to give me a new 4g board for my 2013 car.
> Kindle Keyboard (3rd generation), Kindle Touch (4th generation), Kindle Paperwhite (4th, 5th, 6th, and 7th generation), Kindle Voyage (7th generation), and Kindle Oasis (8th generation)
The 7th gen paperwhite, for example, was still being sold until 2018 [1]. It seems kind of ridiculous to still be selling a 3G-only device 3 years ago, and to only be offering a partial credit for a device that’s going to stop working so soon after purchase.
[1] https://blog.the-ebook-reader.com/2018/11/09/kindle-paperwhi...
Yeah, but you don't really have access to them!
most libraries even mail them to you
FWIW: I prefer the backlight on a tablet to paper so much that I'll re-buy a book on Kindle even if I have the print copy.
"Amazon sending free kindle upgrades to customers affected by carriers removing 3G network access"
I've tried the newer Kindles, and keep going back to the KK and DX.
Well, I would make one change. Have the last page read be the screen display when off instead of those boring and useless pictures it shows.
The screens are much better on the new ones though.
I've read on a kindle very close to every single day for at least 10 years (Kindle Touch first, now Paperwhite), and I keep it in airplane mode 99.999% of the time or more. If I buy a book from Amazon, I'll put it on Wifi until it's downloaded, then back to Airplane Mode.
I know that I can look something up on Wikipedia were I online, and this is the only feature I know of that I might sometimes be tempted to use. It's difficult for me to imagine a scenario that I would want to buy a reading device that could connect to the internet on cellular data.
It was great for when I was at the airport and I found out I needed to buy an onward ticket to appease the airline.
Ultimately the lack of a backlight made me sell it off within a year.
My real use-case for the DX was textbooks because the screen was large and it was easier to read code snippets. Back in the day I bought a lot of those from Manning or O'Reilly directly and then loaded them onto the DX via USB. Reading PDFs was nicer as well, but again, I loaded them over USB.
But for the first few years I owned it, I actually used it to read nearly all of my ebooks and do a significant amount of web browsing and communication, including HN, Gmail, FB, and anything else. The e-ink + physical keyboard made it my favorite web mobile device.
Somewhere between 2012 and 2015 sites stopped working as well and I realized it was because of https requirements which the experimental browser wasn't supporting, and I stopped using it as much, and then not too long after became a less frequent user of it to read ebooks -- my iphone was always with me and almost as good for most ebook content.
8 years later, it still works wonderfully.
[1]: https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/toronto-ice-storm-2013-...
When I used a Kindle, I didn't carry it with me all the time. Sometimes I'd pull out my phone and continue reading my book if I had a long wait.
If I'm doing a lot of reading while sitting upright, I'll open Kindle on my laptop so I can have the giant screen and bigger text.
If I read in the hot tub, (my favorite place to read,) I use an older phone or a cheap tablet. This way, if it gets wet I don't break my primary device.
The ability to just sync without having to think about anything, is amazing.
There used to be a dream that was ubiquitous free wifi (like water fountains), but it unfortunately never materialized. Everything requires a password, some terrible captive portal, and often a registration of some kind to use now. It's really sad.
These things just work. I'll miss that.
When the last of my old Kindles with the physical buttons died, I broke down and bought an Oasis, and... it's wildly better than a modern Paperwhite or a Kindle Fire, but it's pretty shittily designed from a usability perspective. The whole thing should be as thick as the offset thick edge, in order to hold it comfortably, and while it is nice to have physical turn buttons back, they're really awkwardly placed to use if you're trying to hold the thing in one hand and use your thumb, as one does with a Kindle.
The buttons are well-placed for me. I hold it in one hand and my thumbs naturally rest right there.
My one complaint is that the touch-screen is still active and sometimes it changes pages when my thumb moves too far in, or when I close the cover. (No idea why the latter happens. Does the cover touch the screen and cause a page flip?)
There might be a better arrangement for the buttons, but I can't imagine what it is.
If I'm reading at night as I fall asleep I don't want to wake up to a book in a different place because my finger brushed the screen as I nodded off.
This is on my 3rd gen Oasis. I don’t know if this feature is available on yours.
I agree with the button placement. KK got it right, Oasis got it wrong.
Turns out I'm fine, there are 3 generations of Oasis: The original 6" with the weird battery in the cover, then the 7", and now the 7" w/color temp adjustment
I've wanted a good excuse to get the latest one for a while but I guess this isn't it.
The 3G has never been critical for me but it's always nice enough to have that I've paid for it on various models over the last 11 years. It can save a lot of hassle when traveling, even if there's a strange Wifi network you could use. A lot of the time the security support on the Kindle has been a bit behind the times and it'd be tricky to get on some networks.
For anyone who doesn't have an anti-Amazon agenda, this is either a non-story or a model example of how to gracefully and professionally handle a transition away from obsolete hardware
It's reasonable to have the wish that color temperature might be similarly introduced to a basic model, when the other features of the basic model otherwise suffice.
It's not really Amazon's fault, I know a relative is receiving a free flip phone through AT&T because the old phone they were using doesn't have 4g LTE support. In that case I think it has to do with being able to call 911.
What actually surprises me is that they have kept backwards support through wifi for these devices, to be able to browse the kindle store. Whispersync, at least the part of it used for cloud sync between kindle and your amazon account, seems to be working too.
This makes it a non story. The device is old, you can still download things and get them on the device. Moving along.
(yes of course it's still a file system under the hood, but it's abstracted away by a less powerful gui)
If it's azw3 stuff, push it through Calibre to mobi, then drag and drop like anything else.
And no 5G is not a replacement. I can manage perfectly fine doing remote work with hangouts/zoom calls on 4G when needed and jumping to 3G/2G for calls and text. If you need security then you can jump on internet.
The 2G/3G spectrum is not open for amateur development.
5G is just for pushing more data faster down people's throats.
The only got feature out of 5G will be open RAN.
Another form of manufactured obsolescence.
That's also why there's been no big rush for competition until pretty recently, with e-ink Android tablets and Kobo becoming more competitive in general.
Not to mention the patent hell around eink display technology itself, which thankfully has also slowly gotten some momentum.
This is a good deal for people who haven't upgraded yet and were looking for a new kindle but for those looking for control over their device, I recommend Kobo instead. You're basically given root access by default. And Kobo is priced competitively. I have a kobo glo hd that's great, wish it had a slightly bigger screen. I can recommend the forma. Kobo even has dropbox support and epub support.
Kindles don't natively support epub. A jailbroken kindle with koreader is required to open up epub, or converting epub to mobi which changes the formatting sometimes.
Android based e-ink tablets don't have the proper processing power to make it feel like a real tablet so you might be left disappointed, like no proper multiple apps running at the same time. I just returned a LikeBook P78. Onyx Boox seems out of budget and there have been other controversies posted here about gpl violations.
Regardless of what ereader you have, I would strongly recommend setting up calibre. Mobileread forums is where a lot of the dev work is shared on jailbreaking basically all ereaders.
I work in the display industry. I've never heard about a "patent hell around eink display technology" from colleagues, coworkers or even gossip at conferences. I've only seen it on HN, which then got picked up by Boing Boing and then blogs and then comments on HN which referenced those blogs. Surely, if this patent hell was true we would have heard about it. Could you elaborate on your claim and if you experienced this patent hell and which patent or patents you are referring to? Please see my comment history to see why I keep asking about this. Hopefully this time I can get a positive data point where I can learn something unlike what I got the last time I tried to ask about this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27980391
A 7" b&w non-backlit eink display would cost several times over that of a 5-6" kindle, which doesn't even account for the wireless chips, display board controller, or anything else, even for a loss leader.
That's true because of volume. I would never expect to be able to get a raw panel in volumes of under 10,000 units directly from a tier 1 supplier, I'd have to get it from a distributor and they'll mark up based on the volume of that specific model. If I wanted a 32" OLED display, the cheapest way for me to get it would be to buy a OLED TV and then extract the panel. If I tried to ask Samsung Displays Inc, they'd be laughing me out of the building. For niche or exotic low volume displays, the markup the distributor would apply would be large since they're holding stock for a long time. And yes, displays do go bad in storage because of accidents, soaking, wetting/corrision due to condensation, improper storage.
> A 7" b&w non-backlit eink display would cost several times over that of a 5-6" kindle, which doesn't even account for the wireless chips, display board controller, or anything else, even for a loss leader.
That doesn't sound right, how do you actually know the costs ad loss leader subsidy? But anyway my original question was about this so called eink patent hell that HN commentors keep talking about.
But according to the Terms: "Offer only valid for invited Amazon customers located in the U.S. who have received this offer directly from Amazon through email."
I don't live in the US and amazon.com refuses to send it to my home address in Europe, but my regional Amazon doesn't accept the promotional code. Bummer.
"To thank you for being one of our earliest customers, we’d like to offer you a promotion code..." Yeah right, a middle finger to you as well.
Some that had a 1st gen have been offered a free Oasis and cover.
Unfortunately, Amazon has provided no updates to address this. The DX cannot connect to Amazon update because it can't establish a secure connection.
At least here in Finland, while 3G shutdowns are planned by most major carriers, 2G shutdown is probably at least a decade away - the 2G network has slightly better coverage in some rural regions, and there are a lot of M2M 2G data users (like electricity meters - those installed over 10 years ago generally use 2G, which is the majority of electricity meters overall).
Large books will take some time to download over 2G, though...
I have 7 or 8 Kindles, and Amazon sends me email all the time. But not this one.
Maybe they are slowly rolling out emails.
I haven't bought that many books anyway in the last 10 years. I mainly use it to read PDFs with the non-official PDF reader.
Free web browsing when international + e-mail access through gmail. The proxy used to be able to get you through the Great Firewall of China...but that stopped after some years.