The iPad is beating the Kindle in all the ways the latter was supposed to succeed. Just look at Time Magazine's website. The end of its articles read, "The following is an abridged version of an article that appears in the print and iPad editions of TIME." That could have been you, Kindle.
I don't want to see the Kindle go. If I'm going to read an e-book, I prefer an e-ink screen. Problem is, the Kindle didn't position itself as a device for just
. It wanted magazines and textbooks to get on board, too, but the two-tone screen just isn't complex enough for a rich page layout.
My dream scenario? A Kindle that resembles the iPad — only since that seems inevitable at this point — complimented by a smaller, e-ink unit that's bare-bones, cheap, and designed as nothing more than a portable e-book reader.
Whatever the company's next move, Amazon has positioned itself well to move beyond the current Kindle. Its app on either the iPhone or iPad, for instance, is arguably the best way to get books on either device. Still, that's a piece of hardware that's not Amazon's, and the prevailing opinion right now seems to be that, as it stands, the Kindle doesn't have much life left in it.
Either way, Apple beat Amazon in a very important way. With Kindle, Amazon launched an e-reader. With the iPad, Apple launched its own category. It's a tablet, sure, but you rarely ever hear it called anything other than the iPad.
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