Following the success of the Kindle 2, Amazon has announced the Kindle DX today. It is a giant sized Kindle – 2 times the size of the original. Other than that, it seems to have the same functionality as the regular Kindle with the only additions being an accelerometer that allows you to turn to view pages in landscape, PDF support and slightly more storage.
The new Kindle really defeats what I enjoy most about the Kindle. The portability. The ease of being able to carry around hundreds of books in my handbag. The Kindle DX is gigantic! Not something that you would want to snuggle up in bed and read, let alone what you want to tote along to the beach with you on holiday.
Some of the marketing states that the Kindle DX is a great way to read magazines. Yuck. Maybe if they have a nice colour screen, but unless I’m only going to read The Economist this would make for a pretty boring magazine read.
So why release this new giant sized Kindle? Seems that the main market Amazon is going after are university students by signing up textbook publishers and running trials in schools. This makes tons of sense to me, but I think that marketing the Kindle DX to mainstream consumers is completely wrong. Why the hell is Amazon going to confuse people who just learned what an e-reader is with two options? Plain dumb.
As you can see, I’m not impressed and I will not be pre-ordering the Kindle DX. Amazon should stick to a real marketing plan and the demographic that this product was made for – students and schools – and take it off their homepage.
