Kindle outside of U.S.

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I've just read today on Amazon.com website a Jeff Bezos letter announcing the availability of Kindle for customers outside U.S. Of course this also means that wireless access is going to work in your country.

I'd be buying one now if DX was available. Unfortunately only 6" Kindle is offered at the moment. However I guess they will be adding DX soon.

Update: There are a few things that do not add up well. Kindles are only sold from U.S. at the moment. That means you have to pay customs, plus overseas shipping plus an slightly more expensive version of Kindle.

Another source of trouble is that Wireless acccess to Wikipedia from Kindle International has "experimental" status, whatever that means. It is not so with US Kindle. And to me, wireless free access to Wikipedia is well worth a price premium. But ... if Wikipedia access is dropped then I do not see enough value on the wireless delivery of paid content.

Comments

Unknown said…
Hi there :)
Im posting here, even though it doesnt have to do with the topic but i couldnt find a topic about hard drives (not that I searched that much I admit :P)lol.
I wanted to have your opinion about a hard disk I just bought. It's a 1TB, the first one that appears in appinformatica's website, and it turned out it's extremely slow copying/deleting files. By extremely I mean it took more than 5min deleting a folder of not even 100 MB (if I recall). It was formated to FAT32, and I first tried to copy 2.5GB but when I saw it was going to take way too long I stopped and deleted that folder. Now im formating it to NTFS (not that I believe it is faster than FAT32, but as i thought maybe formating could fix the problem, I opted for NTFS because it is supposed to be more secure) Now again, formating is taking an eternity, so I wanted to ask you if in anyway this could be "normal" or if I should go back to the store and ask for another one.
Thanks a lot in advance!
2:21 pm
Unknown said…
I am sorry to bother you again. but I "managed to fix it". Actually.. I ended up cancelling the formating as it took long enough as to get me upset, so I decided to cancel it. Turned out pop errors started their festival.. :s so I had to unplug it. Then after plugin it back.. all went smooth :)
2:37 pm
misan said…
Hi Zac,

I'm sorry to hear your new harddisk is giving you trouble.

You are correct, NTFS is not giving you a speed much different than FAT32. However You can have files larger than 4GB in NTFS.

Please be aware than a drive you tried to format and whose format process was canceled may not be very reliable.

Whenever possible please check the file system is sound (i.e. scandisk, chkdsk) before adding new files.
3:46 pm
Unknown said…
Is 975 KB/s a decent speed for coping files? I would hardly believe so.. I'm i wrong?
7:36 pm
misan said…
I don't think so.

I'm getting around 24MBytes/sec read speed on my USB-based harddrive. Slightly less than that when writing.

Because ... we are talking about USB connection, right?
7:59 pm
Unknown said…
Ok, now it seems that things are getting better.. After copying the first folder at a speed of 975KB/s now its getting more reasonable. I'm having speeds around 14MB/s. And yes, it's a USB connection.
Thanks!!
9:40 pm
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