Ugly Duckling

Assuming the Amazon tablet is real and ready to ship, what's to become of the ? An oversized e-reader with a 9.7-inch E-Ink display, Amazon's Kindle DX stands out--and not in a good way--in a rapidly changing tablet/e-reader market.

Overpriced at $379, the DX lacks the capabilities of less expensive now hitting the market, including the $330 Acer Iconia Tab A100, the $300 Viewsonic ViewPad 7, and the $250 Lenovo IdeaPad A1. And even though the four tablets listed above have smaller, 7-inch color screens, they're more iPad than e-reader--the distinction being that the latter is used primarily for reading books.

But wait, there's more. Barnes & Noble's successful $250 Nook Color and Amazon's upcoming 7-inch color tablet--also expected to cost $250--only make the oddball Kindle DX look worse. The DX is too big and pricey to appeal consumers who want a dedicated e-reader, yet too limited to function as an e-textbook device in academia.

A 2009 by Princeton University slammed the Kindle DX for its slow performance and weak annotation tools. And while Amazon has enhanced the DX since then, the device, with its non-backlit screen and clunky keyboard, is increasingly falling behind a growing number of newer, flashier slates.