Cool Tech Reviews

A number of online (and brick and mortar) merchants are starting their Black Friday sales early this year to get a jump on the competition in these uncertain economic times and Amazon is one of them. In checking out today’s Amazon Black Friday electronics sale items I spotted the following which I thought were of interest:

• $100 (50%) off a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5 TB SATA 32 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Hard Drive ST31500341AS with free shipping.
• $110 (48%) off a Garmin nüvi 260W 4.3-Inch Widescreen Portable GPS Navigator with free shipping
• $156.45 (45%) off a Garmin nüvi 265W/265WT 4.3-Inch Widescreen Bluetooth Portable GPS Navigator with Traffic with free shipping
• $150.00 (21%) off a HP Pavilion DM3-1030US 13.3-Inch Silver Laptop - Up to 6 Hours of Battery Life (Windows 7 Home Premium) with free shipping

New items will get the Black Friday treatment every day so you will need to check back each day.

Frequent online shoppers know what a bargain killer shopping and handling charges often are. Amazon.com tries to combat that with their Amazon Prime service in the USA which provides free two-day shipping on most (but not all) of their merchandise and that of many partners who list products with them. Amazon Prime has no minimum order requirement and also offers an optional flat $3.99 per item upgrade fee to one-day shipping on many items if you really need them fast.

Ordinarily Amazon Prime costs $79.00 per year, but it doesn’t take much online shopping for shipping charges to add up to that amount. Amazon, of course, hopes that Prime’s free shipping will make them the first and only stop for your online shopping.

We are satisfied Amazon Prime users in my household, but many people are naturally wary of a non-negligible upfront fee. Well, for this holiday season Amazon has a promotion that they hope will change your mind - Amazon Prime is free for one month for new Prime users. If you sign up now you will get all the Amazon Prime benefits for one month that will cover the bulk of the holiday shopping season including Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

If you shop for the holidays online and Amazon covers any part of your shopping list, this offer is a real bargain.

Amazon yesterday launched the $489 Kindle DX, the big screen version of the Kindle 2, but the puzzle is who the target for the rather large portable book reader actually is. The big 9.7 inch diagonal e-ink screen makes the Kindle DX pretty bulky for merely a ebook  reader, but Amazon has announced new deals with for magazine and newspaper publishers which presumably are a better fit for the format.

In fact, the New York Times, Boston Globe, and Washington Post will subsidize the Kindle purchase price if you live in an area where they do not offer home delivery and purchase a Kindle DX and an electronic subscription.

Another target market for the Kindle DX is college students as Amazon also announced deals with textbook publishers for Kindle versions as well as trials at major universities:

The schools will distribute hundreds of Kindle DX devices to students spread across a broad range of academic disciplines. In addition to reading on a considerably larger screen, students will be able to take advantage of popular Kindle features such as the ability to take notes and highlight, search across their library, look up words in a built-in dictionary, and carry all of their books in a lightweight device.

Time will tell how well that works out - I think I would still prefer a paper textbook. However, one market where the Kindle family seems to be a definite success is in good old fashioned books for reading. According to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Kindle sales are now 35% of book sales when Kindle editions are available and there was a huge jump in February when the Kindle 2 went on sale.