Comment by yequalsx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yequalsx | Hacker News Reader

I was planning to get an iPad. I thought Apple would update the iPad 2 for the holidays but they didn't. Then Amazon came out with announcement of the Kindle Fire. For less than the price of an iPad I can get 2 Kindle Fires and 1 Kindle Touch.

I pre-ordered a Kindle Fire. The Kindle Fire is the Chromebook Google should have built. People aren't prepared to have absolutely everything on the cloud. People read while on the train or in a plane. There needs to be some local storage.

By utilizing Amazon's cloud infrastructure I'm guessing the Fire doesn't need a large amount of local storage or a large amount of RAM. Amazon is providing a top of the line user experience with less than top of the line hardware. This is my hope.

There is also Amazon's customer service. I bought my first Apple product in June (a Macbook Pro) and the two times I've had to talk to Apple's repair people about an issue they acted as if I'm an apostate. I've had nothing but amazing customer service from Amazon.

I think Bezos has a hit with the Fire. The only tablet that will compete with the Fire this holiday season is the iPad.

>The Kindle Fire is the Chromebook Google should have built. People aren't prepared to have absolutely everything on the cloud. People read while on the train or in a plane. There needs to be some local storage.

> By utilizing Amazon's cloud infrastructure I'm guessing the Fire doesn't need a large amount of local storage or a large amount of RAM. Amazon is providing a top of the line user experience with less than top of the line hardware. This is my hope.

These two statements are at odds with each other. 8GB is paltry for any amount of video or music (on my iPhone, a full 13GB is music/audio - I listen a LOT of books on tape and podcasts).

The cloud for personal media is unreliable for a big chunk of time as many mobile providers either don't provide coverage, bandwidth or quota to fulfill my needs... it's not clear that 8GB+CloudDrive will do this (it would be great if CloudDrive 2.0 would just treat your local available store as a giant cache).

Proof will be in the pudding. However, given that Amazon has yet to tell us how many Kindles it's sold or how much money they have made on them, it's unclear how we'll be able to gauge it's success.

The statements are not contradictory at all. Some local storage is needed for people who will out of range of wi-fi. Like airplane travelers. But they don't need a lot of local storage. People just need enough local storage to bridge the gaps in wi-fi coverage. Internet access is ubiquitous but it isn't universal.

While on the internet Fire users will stream their content. They don't need a high powered device to do this as Amazon's cloud infrastructure will be doing some of the work. While off the internet the device just needs enough power to play videos, read books, and play songs and games. This doesn't require a heavy duty processor.

You can get an idea of this with their MP3 Cloud Player for Android. I keep a minimum of music on it for gaps in coverage and things I listen to very frequently, but it easily shifts to "cloud mode" and streams well on 4g/wifi.

Chromebooks have at least 16GB of storage for caching things locally. For example, I believe that the Kindle app for Chrome supports offline reading.

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