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vvanders

The e-ink display showing a shipping label is brilliant.

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An AWS service with free shipping and a Kindle glued on. It's the ultimate synergy for Amazon.

This article says it's not e-ink but just a Kindle strapped to the side.

>It has a Kindle on the side, which functions as an automatic shipping label.

http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/07/amazon-launches-snowball-a-...

> This article says it's not e-ink but just a Kindle strapped to the side.

Guess what a Kindle's display is?

Unless i'm mis-judging the scale of this thing, that screen looks a fair bit smaller than a kindle. I think it's just techcrunch using "kindle" as a generic word for e-ink display.

The Amazon exec who introduced the Snowball during the keynote also called it included a "Kindle".

Perhaps a mini kindle, I estimate by the image that's about 2x4" max.

Kept scrolling and looking for a picture of said label, to no avail.

I found an image here: http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/07/amazon-launches-snowball-a-...

Weird - something about the form factor makes me want to violently toss it off a loading dock. Anyone know how much that would translate to in Gs? (The article says it will survive 6 Gs of shock.)

A whole lot. It depends on how fast it is going. See http://measurespeed.com/deceleration-calculator.php for a quick-and-dirty overview. Gravity accelerates at at 9.8m/s², so if it fell for one second before impacting the ground, and took (for instance) 0.05 seconds to deform before coming to a halt, it'd have experienced 8.91 Gs of shock.

One second is a long time. That's a drop of 16 feet?

For the purpose of conjecture, yes :-)

> 0.05 seconds to deform before coming to a halt

I always found it amusing that hard drives were rated in the hundreds of Gs until someone reminded me that 'time to stop' when dropped on a hard surface was very short indeed...

Really? Why? I mean, Kindles are pretty cheap, but sticky shipping labels are a few bucks for rolls of 500, and very hard to damage in transit.

Oh, this label is smart. It knows when to change.

If you had sticky shipping labels, you'd need some intelligence.

Especially when you consider the fact that they've been making kindle's for years... perfect way to merge existing Amazon technilogies.

Yes, this is the most interesting aspect of snowball.

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