What does it cost to make a Kindle?

[thewayne]

About 52% of the price that Amazon charges, with over 40% of that being the display.

I have no problem with Amazon making a decent profit on it, they have R&D costs to recover and to pay for developing the Kindle 3, etc. What I do have a problem with is the amount of money they are paying to Sprint to subsidize the cellular connection that it requires. I would be perfectly happy with a unit that required a WiFi or BlueTooth or USB connection (or memory card, for that matter) to transfer books to it if they would bring the price down to under $200. Unless I become a road warrior, there is no way I'd pay $360 for one of these puppies, regardless of how cool it is.

http://www.businessweek.com/print/technology/content/apr2009/tc20090421_430707.htm

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/22/1935202&art_pos=17

Comments

[silveradept]

I've got a Handspring Visor Pro that I inherited right now, but the Graffiti is going out on it and the tapping of styluses isn't keeping up like it used to. I think it may be on its way out. Thus, new tool to keep up with me.

I did not know Dell made PDAs - the reviews that I read all favored Palm and HP products. It's too late to retract the decision now, but do you think it would have been a possibly inexpensive way of keeping things going?

Did not know about the SF archive on Gutenberg - may download some amount of it on to the new device, just so that I have something like "The Last Question" readily at hand if I make a reference to the last line in it.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Well, broadly-speaking, there's three families of PDAs: Palm, Windows Family (WinCE, Windows Mobile, and I think there's another family), and everyone else (I think Symbian is one of these). The Windows family includes HP/Compaq/iPaq, the Dell series, and anyone else I can't think of. Palm included Handspring, Sony, and IBM. Handspring was formed by former Palm execs (Palm started as a 3Com company) which they later sold back to Palm.

The list of makers of Windows family devices is pretty impressive: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Windows_Mobile_devices. But they're largely identical in features since they're all running the same OS. In terms of reliability, no idea. My Dell Axim has been pretty solid, though it does require a reboot mostly weekly (no surprise there).

As far as being inexpensive, the $130ish that I paid for the Axim is a little more than an identical Palm Zire Z22 which is slowly failing on me and considerably less than the Tungsten which has lots of really horrible reviews on Amazon. So I decided to jump ship and see if other PDAs were reasonable quality. So far, so good, except for some inexplicable reason I don't seem to be able to find software to sync my Windows Mobile device with my Macintosh. :-)

[silveradept]

Ah, that explains why I didn't consider it - I did not want to go with Windows Mobile anything, smartphone or otherwise, and so I restricted my options pretty hard by doing so - the Palm that was recommended was more expensive than the Nokia device, and I think I can do more with the Nokia that I would be able to with the Palm, so that's what I went with. Here's hoping that it turns out to have been a smart decision.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

For me, I didn't want a phone for a PDA, so going with a Smartphone wasn't practical. Though considering the size of my Dell, the Smartphone might not be significantly larger.

[silveradept]

Yeah. Smartphone was not what I wanted, especially because it required the data plan to be useful. I'm not paying for a data plan to use a phone as a mostly-offline external memory module.