Interead Cool: The Budget Kindle?

Jun 5 2009, 2:20pm CDT | by Robert Evans

Cool beans. Someone's finally realized that the way to make E-Readers more attractive is to make the damn things cheaper and more colorful. That attracts business from both the misers, and people who are easily impressed by pastels. Both markets are surprisingly large, and the Interread Cool should do very well if it can get a decent ad campaign underway.

The Cool is a budget E-Reader that matches the Kindle 2 in screen size, but beats it in price, weight, and number of readable formats. While the Kindle 2 will set you back around $360 the Cool only costs $250. And it comes in eight pretty colors, which beats the pants off of Amazon's curiously monochromatic product.

It's always nice when an upstart new product comes in and lets the world know that, yes, the other guys are marking up their products to a ridiculous degree. Yes, E-Readers are expensive to make, but obviously there's some room for cost-cutting. Interead understands that E-Readers are not going to catch on as educational devices and 'textbook replacements' until the price comes down substantially.

You can get a solid HP netbook for $60 less than a Kindle 2, and there's no arguing that the netbook has way more potential uses. You can stick PDF textbooks on a netbook, after all, but you can't surf the Internet or play old computer games on your Kindle. The Cool is at just a low enough price that its something I can see a poor college student grabbing. It'll make his life easier without killing his beer/pizza/pot budget for the year.

That's what Amazon has to do with the Kindle more than anything else. It has to be a justifiable expense for people who don't have very much money, because that's the demographic you're targeting when you try to sell to students and teachers.

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Robert Evans
The excitement about new smartphones, tablets and anything mobile drive Robert to unearth the latest rumors and developments in this fast moving space. He adopted 4G as soon as it become available and knows where the mobile market is going.
Robert can be contacted directly at robert@i4u.com.