Saturday, March 13, 2010

iPad or Kindle?

Ok, I have been wanting a Kindle for forever!!!  But I am doing the Compact for the 4th year!!  I can't believe I have completed 3 full years already.  And yet there it is.  The premise of the Compact is that we don't just go out willy-nilly and buy new things.  We stop, we think, we find a way to re-purpose something we already own, we go to Craigslist, we go to Freecycle, we beg, borrow but definitely NOT steal; all BEFORE we trot down to a retail store and spend hard-earned cash.  And let me just say that the Compact has changed my life forever.

So I have been lusting after a Kindle for several years now and trying to find a way to justify its purchase. Less books produced means less trees killed means less clearing out I have to do on my bookshelves and also = less money spent on each book since they are $9.99 on the Kindle!  But that initial cash layout has always made me balk and wait.

But then I discovered that the Kindle is available to me on my AMEX reward points!  Woo Hoo!!  O happy day!  So I have been accumulating points with all my gas purchases, grocery shopping, etc and yesterday I checked and I now have enough to get the Kindle DX.  Awesome!

Yesterday I also got an email from Apple telling me the joys that I too could have if I would only pre-order the iPad which is coming out in less than one month.  I watched all the videos they sent about how fantabulous the iPad is and guess what?  All their marketing worked!  Now I want an iPad!

If I understand all the hype the iPad will do most of what the Kindle will do plus about 3,453,987 more things.  And at about the same cost.  Do I need all those other 3,453,987 things?  Maybe.  Who knows? None of us thought 10 years ago that every person on the planet NEEDED a stupid cel phone.  Apparently that was wrong.  20 years ago people were just getting home computers and look how that has changed the face of things!

I am going to keep thinking on this and try to make a plan I can live with.  This needs to be a well-thought out decision.  It needs to keep the spirit of the Compact.  And it needs to be something I will not regret.

If you have any thoughts or insight into either of these items or how I might go about making my decision, comment away!

2 comments:

  1. We absolutely love our Kindles. Reserving judgment on the iPad, but it will have color photographs, which Kindle doesn't yet have (it has text only). I agree that it's best to not buy the first generation of anything -- let them work out the bugs on others!

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  2. Hmmmm.... well, it sounds like the Kindle would be a repurposing of your AMEX points....

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