Amazon Kindle Goes From Awesome to Obsolete Overnight

So pretty much everyone out there knows about the Amazon Kindle and what a great e-book reader it is. The Kindle is, if you believe the front page of Amazon.com, their #1 selling item which would mean that pretty much every other person you know should have one.

The Kindle is a great device... for reading books, but that's where it ends. You can read books, newspapers, etc. with wireless access world-wide, but for all the money you spend what else do you get?

Well it has text-to-speech. Yes it does, but who would really use that on an e-book reader? You want the e-book reader so that you can read the book yourself, not so that you can listen to text-to-speech.

It has free samples of books so you can start reading them before you buy them. Why in the world would you want to do that? If you know of a book that you want to read you would buy it, you aren't going to want to read the first chapter of a book to see if you like it or not first.

The book prices are only about $10, and there's 400,000 to choose from! Yes, that's great... but did you also know that Amazon can DELETE anything from your Kindle whenever they want without your approval? Point in case, they gave for free to Kindle buyers George Orwell's 1949 masterpiece "1984" at no charge, and then found out they had to pay royalties for each instance of the book and instead deleted it from ever Kindle device in one fell swoop. Kindle owners had no choice in the matter.

It's got a big 9.7" screen with 16 shades... of gray. Wow, gray. That's amazing. I believe it was 1953 when the first color television was released to consumers by RCA and now, 57 years later, we have a $500 black and white Kindle.

But the Kindle must do something right or nobody would buy it, right? It's true the Kindle is a great e-book reader. One of my friends bought a Sony e-book reader not too long ago, and it was blown out of the water by the Kindle so he ended up selling his Sony partly out of disgust with the unit. If you're looking for an e-book reader you can't get better than the Kindle, it really excels at what it was designed to do.

If the Kindle is just an expensive e-book reader then what should I really be looking at?

In all honesty, the Apple iPad is not something I am going to buy, but is it something that maybe you should buy?

The iPad is the same size as the Kindle DX, and starts at only $10 more than the Kindle. For your $10 you get a full color screen, internet access, and basically what is a redesigned netbook computer. For $10 you get something that can do almost everything your current laptop computer can do as well as basically everything that the Kindle does. The thing about the iPad is that it does everything the Kindle does better than the Kindle does it.

The iPad is an amazing device, but I don't want one for use in my Sony digital camera repair business. The reason why is because Google is soon to release their own tablet which will blow the Apple iPad out of the water and render it obsolete as the iPad is soon to do to the Kindle.