I don't understand this rationale at all. How does the Kindle Fire devalue the Kindle brand name? The Fire is a different product from the e-ink Kindles. You can still say "get a Kindle touch for $99" or "get a Kindle with hard keys for $79."
Audio is the core feature of the original iPod. Reading is the core feature of the Kindle. Reading from an lcd screen is a significantly worse experience than from e-ink. My point is that Amazon releasing the Kindle Fire is akin to if Apple released the iPod Touch (which had new features such as web browsing, youtube etc.) with degraded 8-bit audio.
The iPod Touch is no where near as good an iPod as the classic, since it lacks the physical UI (the key differentiator for the iPod, not sound quality which has been variable) but makes up for it by adding extra features. So Apple pretty much did exactly what you suggest.
I suppose you are right. Kindle brand could be stronger if tight to e-ink eye confort and even black and white, which make the thing austere and monacal, and not toyish like iPad.
I don't know, is touchable e-ink coming in near future? Then they could have waited for that, and improve a lot Kindle OS (allow for plugins, real browsing, epub, viable pdf, email, etc) meanwhile.
Yeah touch has been around I have a sony reader that's at least 4-5 years old now that has a touchable e-ink display. The reasons they went with a lcd is color and response(refresh?) time on e-ink display. You can't watch a movie or play games or browse the web on e-ink kindles.
Define worse. When I got an iPhone, my iPod went into complete disuse, and I ended up giving it to a friend. The iPhone/iPod touch interface is, to me, far and away better than the original iPod interface. This was then bolstered with the new earbuds that added volume control to the pre-existing track control on the mic/clicker.
It certainly has less drive space than older iPods, but I have yet to fill up my iPhone. I understand using the old iPod as a portable hard drive, but storing your entire music collection on it never made sense to me - which is why I gladly traded the smaller drive space for the better interface.
Obviously it depends on personal taste and use, but I think the Touch has a couple of serious deficiencies compared with the others. First, I believe that battery life isn't as good, although I could be wrong on that one. Second, it's impossible to play, pause, or switch tracks without actually looking at the thing unless you're using a compatible headset. Plus the storage space you mention.
I think the Touch and iPhone are more than adequate for the task, but they're not quite as good as the pure iPods, and that functionality is completely eclipsed by their other capabilities. I haven't used an iPod since getting an iPhone either, but that's just because it suffices, not because it's equally good.
Audio quality was not. iPods never supported Ogg Vorbis or FLAC, for example.
Ultimately, some ppl like reading white-on-black text on LCDs at night instead of e-ink. LCDs aren't better or worse, they're just different. Matter of preference.
??? Vorbis is a lossy audio compression algorithm, much like AAC or MP3. I would be very surprised if in a A/B test anybody could tell the difference between comparable bitrate lossy codecs.
FLAC was a licensing problem -- when Apple wanted to add lossless, they did so, with a clean-room lossless compressed audio codec.
