I’m a Kindle fan. Ever since pal Jeff Belk turned me on to his one day flying from Las Vegas to San Diego I’ve been hooked. I have some regrets though. When I was in Europe I couldn’t update it and that was a bummer. I only wish it had WiFi in addition to the Whisper Network from Amazon and Sprint.
But that one hurdle aside, I’ve become a Kindle fan because not only does it let me read books without carrying them, I can also read business magazines and newspapers while traveling without the added weight.
Larry Golob of the GIPS team penned a piece yesterday about the Kindle and brought up a very interesting point near the end where he wrote:
At Global IP Solutions, we are seeing significant interest from customers developing real time voice and video applications for the mobile market. Maybe we will soon see a Kindle with real-time voice and video for those unable to attend their book club in person.
This is in alignment with my divergence concept written about after Telco 2.0 last April. Basically, you take a device which is designed to do one thing exceptionally well and add in additional, and complimentary, functionality. Larry’s suggestion of adding voice to the Kindle is a dead on the mark application of my suggestion.
From my perspective, the Kindle can be a lot more than it is today and my guess is that it will be more than what it is in the very near future.