Amazon crimps free Kindle 3G surfing The free ride is over: owners of early Amazon Kindles that included free global access to 3G networks will now have their ability to surf the net crimped. Kindle owners could access the Internet thanks to the experimental browser included in some early models of the e-reader. The browser used the same connection 3G-equipped …
People figured how to tether a PC to their Kindle and use the free connection to do all their regular browsing and torrenting. I've seen users boasting about how many gigabytes of data they downloaded for free. No way Amazon were ever going to tolerate that. 50MB seems a bit low though. Why not 500MB, so as not to spoil it too much for the majority?
Yep, as soon as few dicks decided to tether their Kindle AND download Gigs of movies, etc. the writing was on the wall for the rest of us.
50Mb seems a bit stingy, but it's about as much as you could bear with the slow nagivation, problems scrolling and tiny keyboard. It's useful as an emergency webmail lifeline.
@RICHTO, don't know why you'd be so adamant it wasn't so. I'll give you one example. Here's a guy bragging about tethering his Kindle and taking 46 G that way at the time (late February)
http://hackaday.com/2012/02/27/tethering-a-kindle-for-free-3g/#comment-590575
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But it was always going to happen eventually.
Does go to show the potential demand for a global cheap mobile data supplier though. With PAYG data getting quite cheap now (for residents of the country, anyway) I'm quite surprised no-one has yet done this well.
Something for Apple or Google to spend their money on perhaps?
No apparent update to the Ts & Cs on Amazon.co.uk only on .com. My 3G Kindle was a god send on a trip last year and i probably racked up more than 50MB trying to reorganise things mid journey. I bought it partially for this functionality.
As stated above given the average page size of 1MB these days that's not a lot of browsing.
I've seen some commenters putting in links and basic HTML - I have a feeling it depends on your standing as a poster (and possibly whether they think you're likely to abuse the facility).
I've never tried it, so I'm happily ignorant of whether they think I'm a disruptive assclown or not.
You'll know when you have been duly blessed - the comment box will be pre-populated with "Type your comment here — basic HTML and hotlinks allowed". Based on the posters I've seen leaving links, the moderation system works pretty well. And, becuaes you don't have it, I have an excuse to call out "noob". Not that I will.
That's a shame, but then again with idiots hacking Kindles to get free, global, roaming internet I suppose this had to happen.
I'm actually surprised it wasn't limited anyway; 50MB is probably sufficient for what I use the clanky browser for. Still, the free global roaming feature is an absolute *godsend* when you're in a foreign country and trying to book/rearrange travel or find your hotel.
My Kindle had already paid for itself many times over on this feature alone and I think/hope that the new limit won't be an issue for me...
I mean come on why is it getting full colour pages for a grayscale device anyway? They should have fed all the web through a proxy that turned it into grayscale and then their bandwidth would have been vastly reduced, the users browsing speed increased and tethering rendered pointless. Surely it is the obvious answer, it always amazed me that tething showed the full internet was there.
I wondered about that... if I'm getting a tablet for reading, I'd much rather have e-ink than otherwise. Though to be fair, my "perfect device" would have e-ink on one side, and a screen on the other; one for low-power tasks, like reading books or checking email, and the other for games, Internet browsing, and the like. And all the size of a largish smartphone. It'll never happen, though... no on would buy it.
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