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George, this is a noble effort, and it would be nice if Amazon collected answers to all these and related questions from us international customers and put them right at the page where they sell Kindle to us. However, the answers are known:
- General browsing is not available because Amazon has no agreements with local cellular providers; AT&T data roaming is used instead, and it is expensive. For the same reason newspapers and magazines arrive without illustrations, and blogs are not available. So, we could actually view Wikipedia access as an unexpected extra. Of course, this does not explain *why* didn’t Amazon enter into local agreements.
- $2 surcharge for books is supposed to cover the same elevated transmission costs. This does not explain why we have to pay the surcharge even if we elect to download the content to our computers, thus avoiding incurring additional costs to Amazon.
- As for content availability in some geographical regions, and elsewhere not, the publishers are to blame. For some reason they think stat staggered "deployment" makes sense. Something akin to DVD region codes. I personally think the practice is counterproductive, but Amazon has no control over it.
I wonder will we hear from Amazon officially.
