Kindle UK, you are now 2, the second generation. Why do you still disregard our entreaties?
Does the jump across the pond worry you? Is it a fear of flying?
Seriously, this is becoming painful to watch. Its reaching the scale of being out of stock of Kindles for Christmas.
Sony is already selling Sony Readers at Waterstones. As are other ereader companies (not just Waterstones, they’ve even gotten partnerships with Pixmania for heaven’s sake). If Apple comes out with an iBook or an iReader, they’ll just leverage their existing channels.
By end of 2009, all the Kindle 2 competitors will have a UK presence – Its about time Kindle 2 hit the UK.
The supposed hold-up is the lack of carrier agreements.
Well, O3 are progressive enough to offer a Skype Phone (for over a year now). Surely, getting them to agree to WhisperNet UK shouldn’t be that hard.
There’s also a ton of competition and the success of the Kindle 2 stateside should make carriers more amenable.
Another thing thrown up is not being able to negotiate agreements across Europe
Yes, the example quoted (of being able to access books on your UK Kindle 2 when vacationing in the south of Spain) is appealing.
However, even Europeans only vacation for 5-6 weeks a year. There’s still 46 weeks a year when London and its overcast skies make Kindle a great companion. Who cares if we can’t get WhisperNet in Spain.
Why the teasing?
Amazon keeps throwing all these signs that kindle uk is around the corner -
- Hiring kindle ‘global leads’ in march 2009.
- Hiring for GSM, UMTS, CDMA experts (for kindle uk perhaps) in December 2008.
- The whole ‘vacation in spain with whispernet’ comment in an interview – obviously they must have thought about it a fair bit to come up with such a far fetched scenario.
- Kindle 2 even has a ‘a missing SIM holder below the WWAN card’ hinting at a GSM/UMTS version of the Kindle. See FixIt’s Kindle 2 tear-down for the comment and images.
And still K2′s not showing up.
Kindle 2′s been a big success – 300K sold in a few months. There’s little competition.
Now’s the time! Release worldwide now, when there’s little competition and lots of buzz. In the UK every newspaper is speculating about it and there’s huge interest. In a few months we might have Plastic Logic running trials and Apple with its iBook.
Now’s the time to get Kindle 2 to UK. Amazon?
Filed under: availability Tagged: | kindle 2 uk, kindle in uk
