Kindle in India(and Ipad 2)
Kindle is ‘the’ device for ereading.It has improved the contrast by 50% compared to the previous model and let me tell you ‘it is almost like reading a book’.I got the kindle directly from amazon some 3 months ago and today while i was browsing some forums i found many people confused about the entire process of getting the kindle to India.
When i ordered the kindle wifi only the base price was 139$ and the shipping was around 25$ and here comes the worst part the customs duty was around 50$ and this made the kindle quite expensive around 205$ but i got it any way because i read a lot of books..a lot.And if don’t read that many books and if you can afford a ipad i suggest you go for the ipad.Don’t get me wrong Kindle is the best electronic reader present in the market and the ipad is the best(ahem..most sold)tablet..I found many people complaining about the glare from the backlit displays like ipad but I have no complaints there.I found both of them good,If you read a lot of books and can’t afford an ipad go for the kindle.Another plus for the kindle is the battery life ,you charge it once and you can forget about charging it again for a long time.Amazon advertised a battery life of 1 month with wireless off but i have squeezed around 3 weeks with occasional wifi to sunc my ebooks,where as the ipad has the battery life of about 10 hours.
Content and availability
For Indians this is a huge disappointment.Read on..
Kindle
You can get the kindle delivered straight to your door step,but for ebooks you would have to pay an extra price of 2$ per book and this price is included in the book price ,this means no free books.There is an alternative though and that is changing your account to an us account Read the complete process here
Ipad
Again Indians are neglected here.The Ibook app is not avaiable in the appstore for India though you can install it again by changing your account to us based account(read the process here).But that is not the only app you can download Kindle for ipad and read the books there.
Update:Amazon has removed the shipping charges on kindle so you can save a sweet 25$ on kinlde.
Ipad2 as of now is not available in India but Apple has released an official statement saying it would be available in India in a few days.
So people what will you buy?
