Amongst all of the hype surrounding the launch of new mobile devices today [September 19th 2014] from Amazon comes one model which is bundled with free 3G. That’s right. Free 3G. The device in question is the Kindle Voyager. Now it is going to take some time for us to trawl through the small print on this offer but in the meantime Amazon is promising free cellular coverage in over 100 countries and territories. It’s a great idea as long as hackers don’t find of way of enabling other devices to share the free 3G link.
The first slight of hand is that the entry level Kindle Voyager is priced at £169 ($277). Which would be great value.
But dig a little deeper and the price for the Wi-fi plus 3G version suddenly starts at £229 ($375).
Next you have got to start thinking in terms of the ‘browsing experience’ on the Voyager. Which appears to be non-existent.
So, in theory – all you get is the ability to download e-books in the middle of a field.
GoMo News did a little asking around and we strongly suspect that the mobile network operator [MNO] wih as supplied with 3G is probably Vodafone.
In the UK, the Kindle Voyage is £169 ($277) and is available for pre-order immediately here and will start shipping on November 4th 2014.
So if you buy the Voyager, you will get free 3G but that’s a far cry from free 4G. Also, we don’t know if there’s a time limit of – for example, one year on the free 3G.
Nor do we know which 100 geographies are covered – so India, for example, could well be left out of the free 3G deal.
Now we spoke to our source – ‘Deep Phone’, about the likely technicalities of this deal and he suggested that Vodafone might well be the 3G cellular provider [MNO].
He pointed out that the balance of usage would inevitably go in the favour of the MNo.
For every user that canes (fully utilises) the free 3G connexion there will probably be eight others who hardly uses it at all.
So it should work out well for the MNO who has concluded this deal – which we estimate will cost Amazon around €25 ($32) per device.
Everything will be great for Amazon’s MNO partner as long as some hack doesn’t find out how to hack the Voyager and let everyone tether themselves to it.
This might sound unlikely until you remember somebody or somebodies found out a way to hack Kindle accounts recently.
Source: http://www.gomonews.com/amazon-introduces-kindle-with-free-3g/
