Amazon Kindles ‘go unused’ after Christmas

The Kindle is the market leading e-reader
Photo: Getty Images
Last Updated: 9:29AM GMT 21/01/2012
Amazon’s Kindle e-reader was among the most popular gifts at Christmas, but many have gone unused, a survey has found.
More than a fifth of those who received a Kindle said they have not used it.
The main reason was that owners had failed to download any e-books, the survey found.
The Kindle was one of the big hits of Christmas 2011. A separate survey found one in 40 British adults was given Amazon’s e-reader.
Those who received an Apple iPad meanwhile, which costs around four times as much as a Kindle, were more likely to have used it. Only nine per cent of new owners said their tablet had remained untouched.
All gadgets beat the classic unused Christmas present, however. Some 91 per cent of 1,461 respondents surveyed by MyVoucherCodes.co.uk said they had not used “smellies and toiletries” they received.
Another one bites the dust as Google closes Picnik
Daniel Cooper, engadget.comGiven the spate of closures, abandonments and wound-up projects, we can’t help but suspect Google’s mantra switching from “don’t be evil” to “sic transit gloria mundi.” Mountain View’s winding up online-image editing site…
Google continues to shutdown their past random acquisitions. Guess the Google developer lottery era has come to a close.
SOSReady is once again supporting the Teens in Tech Conference for 2011. The Teens in Tech Conference is about connecting youth and technology with entrepreneurship, startups and the web; in front of an audience of young entrepreneurs, developers and designers. SOSReady is once again very proud a
Pretty amazing how impressively you can edit a video on this thing.
RIM PlayBook to benefit Quanta and Foxlink
Yenting Chen, Taipei; Joseph Tsai, DIGITIMES [Thursday 7 April 2011]
As Research In Motion (RIM) is set to launch its PlayBook tablet PC on April 19 in the US and Canada priced at US$499.99, its upstream assembly partner Quanta Computer and connector supplier Foxlink are both expected to benefit, according to market watchers.
The market watchers pointed out that Quanta is currently picking up it pace for the device’s shipments to RIM as Quanta internally sees the device as one of the major tablet PC orders for 2011.
Sources from touch screen panel makers also pointed out that PlayBook shipments were postponed for about a month from the original schedule due to a delay in software testing as well as shortage of touch panels because Apple already booked up most of the available capacity.
Foxlink has also recently started mass shipping its connectors to RIM for the PlayBook. Foxlink is also a connector supplier for iPad 2, the sources added.
This shows how remarkably good Apple is on planning for the future. Well played.
Apple should license this to Playmobil….brilliant idea. ThinkGeek rocks.
My son’s first voice-over work on No Agenda, Episode 292. Direct link to the show here: http://www.mevio.com/episode/275475/na-292-2011-04-03 or listen below:
No Agenda features Adam Curry & John C. Dvorak, who deconstruct the media and bring awareness to the BS.
Thanks to @adamcurry and the @realdvorak
Is Microsoft hoping tablets will go out of style?
Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s global chief research and strategy officer, doesn’t seem to have much faith in the future of the tablet.
“I don’t know whether the big screen tablet pad category is going to remain with us or not,” he said, according to the Sydney Morning Herald.
Mundie’s beliefs run contrary to those of seemingly everyone else in the industry. Aside from the remarkable success of the iPad, virtually every hardware maker in the game has done their best to push out their own tablet. IDC, a tech research firm, predicts tablet sales will reach 42 million in 2011.
Mundie, however, believes that tablets will be stamped out as smartphones and laptops squeeze out the only-temporary tablet. Predicting that the smartphone will become “your most personal computer,” with laptops as a “portable desk,” Mundie noted that “mobile is something that you want to use while you’re moving, and portable is something that you move and then use.” The tablet, however, occupies the middle space.
“Personally I don’t know whether that space will be a persistent one or not,” he said.
His comments contradict not only the general mood of the personal computing industry, but the words of Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who ten years ago proclaimed that the tablet was “virtually without limits,” going on to predict that within five years it would be the most popular kind of PC in America.
Story continues below
Of course, Gates was not quite accurate in his given timeframe—Microsoft’s early tablets failed to find a foothold. But Microsoft doesn’t seem too keen to try again this time round, despite a markedly different environment. The company has been slow to develop tablets up to par with the iPad or the Android-run tablets from others, and has yet to release an OS created specifically with the tablet in mind.
But maybe Microsoft can jump on the as-of-yet unrealized PC innovation Mundie does endorse:
“I believe the successor to the desktop is the room, that instead of thinking that the computer is just something on the desk that you go and sit in front of, [in the] future basically the whole room is the computer and you go in it,” he said.
Very cool approach and great use of modern web technologies.
DAVID HORSEY’S DRAWING POWER« CARTOON/COLUMN: The myopic selfishness of libertarians | Main
CARTOON: Trading liberty for the illusion of safetyGrope and go…
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Posted by David Horsey at November 18, 2010 1:08 p.m.
Pretty much the way it is…


