this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2025
252 points (98.8% liked)
Technology
65879 readers
4040 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I still kick myself for not getting one of the first Kindle models that had free 3(4?)G built in.
I don’t think it was free, you still had to pay for data
No, it was free. Not really usable for web browsing given abysmal performance of Kindle Keyboard, but 100% free.
Huh how does that even work? Amazon doesn’t have a mobile network so were they just paying some third party and eating the costs?
Yeah they were using AT&T. Remember that at the time Kindle books were limited with respect to images so you're talking a couple megabytes tops. The Lord of the Rings trilogy in its entirety, images and all, is 12MB. The primary use case was whisper sync which is just sending page numbers.
Plus this was on 3G while AT&T had moved mostly over to LTE, so you weren't competing for bandwidth with most subscribers. I imagine Amazon got a pretty good deal, but more importantly it helped cement them as the default option for e-readers.