The international version of Amazon’s Kindle ebook reader started shipping today, bringing the product to over 100 countries outside of the USA. I’ve tried to cover all of the questions people may have about the device:

Cost and ordering
The international Kindle sells for $279 (around R2100) and shipping to South Africa is billed at an additional $20 (about R130). Delivery to SA, says Amazon, should take 2 to 7 days. However, be aware that you are likely to be billed for VAT and customs duties when the device lands in your country. The total price of the Kindle is therefore likely to be around the R2600 mark once everything has been factored in – Amazon says it should not cost more than that.

The only way to get a new international Kindle is to buy it from Amazon and have it shipped to you.

Wireless delivery of books, newspapers and other content is included in the price of publications (about $9.99 or R75 for newly released books) and will work in any country that supports it, so you can buy books while traveling and not have to worry about data costs. This is exclusive to international Kindle users – the American, CDMA-version Kindle’s wireless connection only allows for free delivery in the US. An additional $1.99 is charged elsewhere.

Here is an interactive map of countries that have support for Kindle Wireless.

Localisation
The international Kindle ships with a US plug adapter, so you will need a converter to use this in South Africa. However, the Kindle also ships with a USB cable that is used to both transfer data to and from the device and charge it. The Kindle uses a standard USB ‘micro-b’ adapter, so you can also use any standard-compliant third-party plug or adapter. (more…)

I’ve started a twtpoll to determine the most popular radio stations in South Africa, according to local Internet users. You can add your votes to the poll by clicking here, and view the results at the same link, or in this blog post. (more…)

As a MobileMe customer I recently found the need to ping Apple’s servers. To my surprise, pinging www.me.com, the domain Apple owns for the MobileMe service, suggested really low latency that could only come from  a local server. I ran the ping over my ADSL connection from my home in Johannesburg.

The server is also resolving to a host in the 165.165.*.* range, which is allocated to South Africa. The only logical explanation I can think of is that Apple must be making MobileMe available to South African customers on local bandwidth – possibly from the same datacentre used to host the local App Store for iPhone.

It’s a little late to do any investigating, but I’ll be calling the local representatives of Apple in South Africa in the morning to find out if this is the case. What I have managed to do is conduct a look-up on the IP and establish its ownership – it’s owned by Telkom. Is Apple a Telkom Business customer?

inetnum:        165.165.0.0 - 165.165.63.255
netname:        IPNET-SAIX-HOSTING-1
descr:          Telkom SA Limited

If Apple does have local servers it would be ahead of competing international cloud providers, such as Google, which is yet to go live with its local servers.

That said, Google is making a big announcement in Johannesburg on Tuesday, 1 September 2009. Will we finally see the local Google data-centre go live?

Things are certainly heating up in the SA cloud space. Or are they?

Some months ago the media in South Africa widely reported on Amazon.com changing its shipping policies to no longer ship to South Africa. A couple of posts on this blog explored that. Turns out the media was wrong for the most part.
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The Apple iPhone is possibly the most near-perfect mobile phone product I’ve used. But it does lack some features that I feel are key. Some of them would be challenging to implement while others really should be there and I’m confused that they aren’t. That said, the iPhone also gets flack for missing some things that I honestly couldn’t care less about.

The competition is heating up for Apple in the phone space. Most of the touch-phone products that claim to compete with the iPhone are rubbish, but Palm recently unveiled its Pre, complete with new operating system WebOS and implementation of some of the features, like copy and paste, that the iPhone doesn’t have.
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