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Took them a while, but it seems as if Amazon has now caught up (in general) with Barnes & Noble with the alternate means to accessing your Kindle books. Today they came out with a Blackberry App. This is good news for Kindle purchasers/owners as it expands the overall reach of diferent devices you can use to read your purchased works.
Of course this won't make a dent in the overall mentality I hear from some folks such as Cory Doctorow that the Kindle is a roach motel that forces you into a proprietary system and that you won't be able to take your books outside of the Kindle. (To be fair, that's a characterization of the way Cory presents it, not a verbatim quote.) He's hardly the only one who constantly insists that Kindle is a closed system. During the whole of Amazonfail, I bit my tongue on more than one occasion, with all the "informed" folks taking stabs at the Kindle spreading a lot of outright false information. The idea was presented quite often that purchased books were only availble on a single hardware format. Which is patently false. You can read a Kindle ebook on an actual Kindle, naturally, but they had an iPhone/Touch app for quite a long time, and for the past several months a PC app. (Unfortunately not available for the Mac yet, they are still listing that as "coming soon.") Never mind the constant intoning that you can only get books for your Kindle through Amazon. Utter hogwash non-sense. But that's would be a whole other conversation I could go into that has nothing to do with what I'm posting about.
We've now got a blackberry Kindle app.
Unforuntately it seems only for a limited selection of supported models, mostly of the newest variety. Gah. That sucks. And worse, there's no details about when they might be expanding this to any older models. I don't like that as it might mean they are just bailing on anything older than what's on the list now. It would surely cut into their potential userbase. It's also only available for US phones. Again, kinda sucks. But, as the iPhone app has expanded beyond our shores, perhaps this will too. And lastly, it seems that like the PC you only get books--no magazines, newspapers or blogs. Well, for me personally no big loss there, since I don't get any newspapers or blogs, and the magazine choices are so limited there's not much incentive for me to get any other than Asimov's. (And that mainly as a space saving issue so I don't have to have unlimited shelfspace in my house as they pile up.) And, no search feature. Bleh.
So, cool that Amazon has finally gotten this out of the gate. But again, the performance looks pretty weak. I'm going to have to give this a C-.
It seems that the reigning champion non-Kindle device goes to the iPhone/Touch. Which, assuming that app will work as is and is allowed on the iPad, that bodes well for users who already have and use this on their existing iPhone/Touch and happen to make the expensive investment in an early iPad. Easy portability to a new reading device.
Of course this won't make a dent in the overall mentality I hear from some folks such as Cory Doctorow that the Kindle is a roach motel that forces you into a proprietary system and that you won't be able to take your books outside of the Kindle. (To be fair, that's a characterization of the way Cory presents it, not a verbatim quote.) He's hardly the only one who constantly insists that Kindle is a closed system. During the whole of Amazonfail, I bit my tongue on more than one occasion, with all the "informed" folks taking stabs at the Kindle spreading a lot of outright false information. The idea was presented quite often that purchased books were only availble on a single hardware format. Which is patently false. You can read a Kindle ebook on an actual Kindle, naturally, but they had an iPhone/Touch app for quite a long time, and for the past several months a PC app. (Unfortunately not available for the Mac yet, they are still listing that as "coming soon.") Never mind the constant intoning that you can only get books for your Kindle through Amazon. Utter hogwash non-sense. But that's would be a whole other conversation I could go into that has nothing to do with what I'm posting about.
We've now got a blackberry Kindle app.
Unforuntately it seems only for a limited selection of supported models, mostly of the newest variety. Gah. That sucks. And worse, there's no details about when they might be expanding this to any older models. I don't like that as it might mean they are just bailing on anything older than what's on the list now. It would surely cut into their potential userbase. It's also only available for US phones. Again, kinda sucks. But, as the iPhone app has expanded beyond our shores, perhaps this will too. And lastly, it seems that like the PC you only get books--no magazines, newspapers or blogs. Well, for me personally no big loss there, since I don't get any newspapers or blogs, and the magazine choices are so limited there's not much incentive for me to get any other than Asimov's. (And that mainly as a space saving issue so I don't have to have unlimited shelfspace in my house as they pile up.) And, no search feature. Bleh.
So, cool that Amazon has finally gotten this out of the gate. But again, the performance looks pretty weak. I'm going to have to give this a C-.
It seems that the reigning champion non-Kindle device goes to the iPhone/Touch. Which, assuming that app will work as is and is allowed on the iPad, that bodes well for users who already have and use this on their existing iPhone/Touch and happen to make the expensive investment in an early iPad. Easy portability to a new reading device.