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> But there’s still a segment of the population who aren’t being catered for; those whose primary computing device is an eReader.

Does this group really exist?

(cool hack, just wondering)

Between about 8:30pm and 7:00am, me. It's close tthe ideal overnight device. Stick an LED on it and the only things left are better text entry and some browser fixes.
A friend of mine was in dire straits a couple of years ago and had to take up residence in a hostel. She couldn't get a proper Internet connection, so she bought a Kindle just for the free 3G connection.
My grandmother owns a Kindle Keyboard 3G and a netbook, she says she prefers the Kindle because "there are two many things popping up at me" on the netbook.
When I got my Kindle I've spent quite some time for the useless jailbreak.

The only cool thing I was able to achieve was to play Star Wars ASCII version over telnet (towel.blinkenlights.nl).

Despite the fact that my Kindle is running Linux, etc, I prefer to see it as an appliance for reading rather than a general purpose computing device. I find the screen too slow even for web browsing. It's without a doubt the best ebook reading device I've owned, but I can't pretend its functionality extends beyond that.

My Android phone on the other hand...

You can push to it - email, web pages etc. It's my most used 'web browser.'
The article says it would be better with a timed text feed. I'm pretty sure this used to exist - you can see that production of subtitles at the beeb uses timed text for the Embedded Media Player (here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/guidelines/futuremedia/accessibility/su... ) - the EMP isn't iplayer, but is the thing that shows news/show clips on the rest of the bbc website.

Also, I recall downloading a feed of one show while the BBC Backstage experiment was going on (when they were pushing open APIs etc). It's possible these things are still out there. I had a dig around and couldn't see timed text attached to any EMP clips though, even on programming for the hearing impaired.

silly question: Do I only need a black and white TV licence if I only watch live TV on my kindle?
In the UK you only need a TV licence if you watch or record live broadcast TV. If you only watch "catch up" stuff on the iPlayer then no licence is required.