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Amazon: Pay more for Kindle Fire, smoke ads from slabs

Freedom to read in commercial-free land comes at a cost

Amazon, in a surprise U-turn, has decided to start selling a more expensive version of its Kindle Fire model that will not stalk its customers with ads.

The giant online retailer said over the weekend that it had applied the switcheroo to its pricing policy. This is after it initially launched its Kindle Fire tablets with static ads that it dubbed "special offers", which quickly pissed off punters who wanted the option of disabling the function.

Customers will now have to pay $15 more to get their hands on an ads-free version of the slab.

An Amazon spokesman told Reuters:

With Kindle Fire and Kindle Fire HD there will be a special offer opt-out option for $15. We know from our Kindle reader line that customers love our special offers and very few people choose to opt out. We're happy to offer customers the choice.

The move, though, will undoubtedly be appreciated by some who were rightly concerned about the massive privacy-lite web proxy Amazon unveiled when it released its Kindle Fire onto the market last year. ®

Re: Good

I'm not sure what you think it's doing is actually what they are doing.

It's just disabling amazon ads/offers on the screensaver isn't it? Ads within apps you download will still be able to display ads, and as far as I know this is the first time a manufacturer of an android (albeit it a fork of android) comes with ads baked into the OS features. Android itself is ad free... it's the crap people put on top that starts shovelling ads at you.

8
0

Re: Good

Umm - I haven't noticed adverts on anything except free games or apps. And I can generally pay for those to get rid of the adverts if I so wish. And I suspect, thought the article doesn't say so, that ad supported games will still serve adverts, it's just the home screen/lock screen adverts that will be disabled.

Incidentally are you talking about rooting the device to install adblock, therefore getting free games and also not giving the developers any money? Tight much?

7
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Ugh...

The day has finally arrived where people have been bamboozled into thinking that it should be a special pay-for feature to not be advertised to.

Having said that...I'd possibly pay a premium for a pair of glasses (NOT google) that filtered out every-day advertising...

8
1

Buy

a Nexus7.

8
1

Basic Maths

Without knowing how likely you were to buy one before the announcement, that doesn't mean a lot.

50%, or 0.5%?

4
0

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