Kindle Gets Games. Really?
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When Amazon announced Kindle Development Kit a while ago, it did promise us some exciting new applications. It has been a while, but Amazon has finally released a couple of games for Kindle. Shuffled Row and Every Word are two free games that Kindle owners can install on their devices right now. Both of these games are word games. The graphics are nothing to write home about, but Kindle is not a gaming device, remember?
I first wrote about the need for Amazon to introduce an app store in 2008. At the time, we were all hoping for a color-screen and somewhat more sophisticated next generation Kindle. Unfortunately, KDK does look a bit limited at this point. Kindle’s App Store (if we can call it that) won’t be beating iTunes anytime soon. Jeff Bezos does not consider Kindle to be anything more than an e-book reader, so trying to out-Apple Apple is not a part of Amazon’s agenda at this point.
We had no trouble taking advantage of these games. Unfortunately, it seems international Kindle owners are having issues downloading these titles. Here is what one disgruntled customer had to say (handle: Theuns):
International users – should we ditch the amazon operating system for an open architecture system, since they don’t want to support us? There are already people who have written software to access the kindle and allow us to write Python apps – these will be open source so anyone can then add functionality without the amazon control.
Let’s hope international Kindle fans get more love from Amazon in the future.
Your turn: are you impressed with the above two games? What types of Kindle games/apps would you like Amazon developers to work on?
