22 Oct 09 Amazon's international Kindle surprises owners with $20 refund, limited web browsing
By "strong customer demand" we assume that Amazon means "we're trying to stay competitive with the $259 Barnes and Noble Nook," but that's just a hunch. A hands-on at the Gadget Lab also reveals the inclusion of web browsing thought to have been disabled. For the most part it is disabled but Amazon does let you browse to the English version of Wikipedia and nowhere else. The hands-on also notes "dead slow" 3G performance and Amazon's decision to ship the international Kindle with a US power plug regardless of destination. Weird.Good news! Due to strong customer demand for our newest Kindle with U.S. and international wireless, we are consolidating our family of 6" Kindles. As part of this consolidation, we are lowering the price of the Kindle you just purchased from $279 down to $259. You don't need to do anything to get the lower price--we are automatically issuing you a $20 refund. This refund should be processed in the next few days and will appear as a credit on your next billing statement.
[Thanks, Simon]
Filed under: Misc. Gadgets, Handhelds
Amazon's international Kindle surprises owners with $20 refund, limited web browsing originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 22 Oct 2009 04:21:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Read | Permalink | Email this | CommentsTagi: barnes and noble, amaz, billing statement, customer demand, amazon, web browsing, hunch, nook, wikipedia, gadget, 3g, surprises, gadgets, sim, few days, nbsp
29 Oct 09 Amazon Patents Changing Authors' Words
theodp writes "To exist or not to exist: that is the query. That's what the famous Hamlet soliloquy might look like if subjected to Amazon's newly-patented System and Method for Marking Content, which calls for 'programmatically substituting synonyms into distributed text content,' including 'books, short stories, product reviews, book or movie reviews, news articles, editorial articles, technical papers, scholastic papers, and so on' in an effort to uniquely identify customers who redistribute material. In its description of the 'invention,' Amazon also touts the use of 'alternative misspellings for selected words' as a way to provide 'evidence of copyright infringement in a legal action.' After all, anti-piracy measures should trump kids' ability to spell correctly, shouldn't they?"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Tagi: scholastic papers, kids ability, amaz, slashdot, amazon, editorial articles, copyright infringement, including books, acti, short stories, anti piracy, hamlet, movie reviews, patents, news articles, product reviews, measures
29 Oct 09 Amazon.com rolls out shortcut for paying online
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Amazon.com Inc on Wednesday announced the launch of "PayPhrase," a shortcut for making purchases on the Web, as the online retailer prepares for a rush of holiday season shopping.Tagi: line retailer, amaz, amazon, launch, reuters, rush
30 Oct 09 Amazon Introduces PayPhrase Payment Shortcut
Online merchants can use Amazon's passphrase payment scheme to ease the friction of online commerce. 
Tagi: line merchants, line commerce, payment scheme, passphrase, amazon
15 Dec 09 Amazon unveils eBay-style auction service for cloud computing
Amazon's cloud computing division is unveiling an eBay-style auction service that will let users bid on unused virtual server capacity, potentially allowing customers to lower the cost of running applications on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud. Known as "Spot Instances," the price of this cloud-based server capacity changes based upon supply and demand, unlike Amazon's usual fixed prices for server instances.
Tagi: server instances, auction service, amaz, server capacity, ebay, amazon, virtual server, elastic compute cloud
