Older Kindles Will Lose Cellular Access
Ian Carlos Campbell (via Hacker News):
Amazon’s Kindle e-readers with built-in 3G will begin to lose the ability to connect to the internet on their own in the US in December, according to an email sent to customers on Wednesday. The change is due to mobile carriers transitioning from older 2G and 3G networking technology to newer 4G and 5G networks. For older Kindles without Wi-Fi, this change could mean not connecting to the internet at all.
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Amazon sent emails with a discount offer to some of the owners of such kindles, for the newer models.
In general, it's sad that even the newest models have mini-USB and older networking tech.
@Dmitri oh wow do the old ones really have mini-USB not even micro? That might even be hard to find cables for nowadays. Obviously any affluent tech-enthusiast will have a newer tablet/reader. But especially the earliest Kindles were renowned for the free & persistent cellular networking to make it easy to download (the miniscule filesize) ebooks and not have to worry about wifi networks or USB cables. If someone's been relying it to work that way for like ten years, they will have a hard time adapting (or maybe even seeing Amazon's email offering discounted replacements).
