@General Lighting 397063 wrote:

I don’t actually see what is particularly odd with Amazon and Kindle working togehter on ad campaigns as presumably you can buy both the machine and e-books from Amazon – seems odd that Burger King joined as I would think its a hassle to eat a burger and work this kindle device at the same time, you’d get grease all over the screen :yakk:.

The full name for the Kindle is “Amazon Kindle”, its their own product.

go on gl you crusty fogey!!!!!!!! !!!

ehhhhh you realise amazon make this? it would be weird for them not to be marketing their own product….

I’d heard of Kindle but around the time it was released there were at least two if not more other similar devices being sold (not Kindles) (one Sony one and someone else) which could be bought independently yet potentially also read content sold on Amazon.

it appears that its only in July that they’ve officially been selling the things in Britain though of course people got them shipped over from foreign countries – hence the ad campaign. the Burger King tie-in is a bit odd – TBH I would have expected places like upmarket coffee shops to have done this rather than BK.

My issue with what could be a much more useful device is the way many (not just Kindles) appear to have been locked down and locked-in against user-created apps or free access of websites.

I think the same may apply to at least some of the smartphones as Dr B mentioned that creating a PV app for them meant incurring further costs.

One app I thought of was last night I was at a beer festival, and the list of beers had to printed out and many of the folk present could not read it due to the small print.

I know the list comes from a wider SQL database as the pub uses this to update the website and presumably also to keep track of the various barrels for stock control and finance purposes. it would be really impressive if you could call up this list on one of these portable devices… (the same could be done for many other food and drink type places..)

@joshd96320 397264 wrote:

think the burger king thing is part of a book that was being read…

were probably actually subliminally endorsing the content of a book rather than burgerking[/quote]

page could have been from any book though, and private companies don’t normally give away thousands of quids worth of airtime to another company..

Quote:

@GL
php is really easy to code, and it can interact with SQL
if these things can read webpages, it would be piss easy to make a page that did that… or, since php is very much like C, borrowing many syntaxes… could probably write a simple app

Thats indeed how the pubs existing website works – but Ive seen multiple complaints that many of these devices (not just kindles) do not render HTML properly or they require the HTML to be converted into a proprietary format with cost implications – and its not rocket science to guess that this might just be done as the machines are being sold cheaply to regain the profits through content sales…

The hardware itself has a lot of potential. what annoys me is that unlike say a netbook or a tablet PC on which you can put Windows or whatever flavour of Linux or anything else you wish, on many models they actively discourage open development….