Amazon Kindle for $89 ($100 off!)
// July 5th, 2010 // 1 Comment » // My Ramblings
After spending the past month debating if I wanted to pay $500 to buy an iPad I ended up deciding against it. The iPad has an incredible looking screen, but it seemed to be lacking some really key features for me:
- Tethering – I can easily tether from my laptop to my cell phone using 3G and surf to my hearts content, but I can’t from the iPad. It has built in bluetooth, but the Apple powers that be didn’t want to support that feature. I have no desire to pay more for the 3G edition and pay monthly for it when I already have a data plan that covers it on my BlackBerry Bold.
- Front Facing Camera – It just seems like they rushed the iPad out the door to capture as much market as they could. The next gen will surely have this feature, and it’ll work great with Facetime.
- Evernote – Being in IT I read a lot, and take a ton of notes. Evernote is phenomenal for this (and many other things), but the iPad edition is missing one big thing. If I have a PDF that’s a few hundreds pages I probably won’t finish that in one sitting. I’d like to be able to close Evernote, come back, and have it remember exactly where I’m at. This may have changed, but when I tested it last this functionality wasn’t there. I have no desire to migrate all my Microsoft Press books, VMware best practices, and other misc. PDF’s to another less powerful solution. I enjoy my sync’d everywhere Evernote solution, and it’d take a lot for me to move elsewhere.
Instead of buying an iPad I went in the other direction and picked up an Amazon Kindle for $89. On July 1st Amazon cut it’s pricing of the Kindle (3G – world data connectivity) to $189. I also remembered that Audible.com was running a promotion to get $100 off select devices that could play back their audiobooks. Being owned by Amazon.com one of those devices is a Kindle (sorry, the iPad isn’t on the list). I love audiobooks for when I’m on the road and when I’m at work so joining Audible.com seemed like a great idea, and this pushed me to finally do it.
If you want to take advantage of the same deal you should join Audible.com’s Gold program here:
http://www.audible.com/deviceoffer/
It’s $14.95 a month, but you get one free audiobook each month. It also comes with the digital edition of the Wall Street Journal, which is nice. That more than justifies the membership price for me, but it it doesn’t for you then you may want to pass on this deal.
Next browse over to Amazon and pick up the Kindle with world wide connectivity here: Kindle Wireless Reading Device, Free 3G
Make sure you enter the $100 off code that Audible.com gives you when you check out and bam, you have a new Kindle for $89 with free two day shipping. If you’re like me and have Bing Cashback laying around you can get it for even less by choosing to receive that with Amazon Payments. Hopefully there are other audio book lovers out there that will appreciate this post. It seems like the $100 off promotion is hidden away.. Most podcasts will encourage you to join Audible.com, but with their code. This blows their other promotions out of the water from my perspective.
Enjoy!
