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Amazon Set to Unveil $199 'Kindle Fire' Tablet
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Yeah, our Panasonic plasma (G25/54) streams Amazon (and Netflix, YT, works with Skype, etc.). Works pretty well, though the UI is a little slow and clunky (like most TVs and STBs). We bought Sons of Anarchy S3 through Amazon, in HD, and watched most of them on the main TV, but watched a few streaming on a notebook upstairs.
There's also a non-Browser based playback app called Unbox which downloaded a local copy (so no streaming issues) and makes a mobile version available (haven't really explored this option yet).
iPad vs Fire
I agree there will be competition between those two. But there are heavy users like me who replaced their notebook with an iPad for taking notes in class (no fan noise, no klicking noise, way less weight, easy task switch, etc) and these kind of people will not use a 7inch tablet optimized for cloud service and receiving services instead of I/O.
As other stated, people like my parents who only need mail access and internet but also want to read a book are the target market. For the one time a week my mom skypes with her two children overseas, an iPad is a lost investment. Her laptop will do just fine for it. Reading books in bed or just check the email or the weather for tomorrow really quick, that is a task very well being done by a $200 tablet like the Fire. There will be a nice night stand, I am sure of that, and it is just replacing the alarm clock which might mount up to $50 if you don't have the cheapest model. If my wife wouldn't have my iPad 1 already, I would buy her one for Christmas.
And about tablet arguments... Apple did not invent them. I can remember being at the C'Bit in 2002 or 2003 and seeing tablet windows PCs with popup keyboard etc. They were based on laptops.
I agree there will be competition between those two. But there are heavy users like me who replaced their notebook with an iPad for taking notes in class (no fan noise, no klicking noise, way less weight, easy task switch, etc) and these kind of people will not use a 7inch tablet optimized for cloud service and receiving services instead of I/O.
As other stated, people like my parents who only need mail access and internet but also want to read a book are the target market. For the one time a week my mom skypes with her two children overseas, an iPad is a lost investment. Her laptop will do just fine for it. Reading books in bed or just check the email or the weather for tomorrow really quick, that is a task very well being done by a $200 tablet like the Fire. There will be a nice night stand, I am sure of that, and it is just replacing the alarm clock which might mount up to $50 if you don't have the cheapest model. If my wife wouldn't have my iPad 1 already, I would buy her one for Christmas.
And about tablet arguments... Apple did not invent them. I can remember being at the C'Bit in 2002 or 2003 and seeing tablet windows PCs with popup keyboard etc. They were based on laptops.
Agreed. $79 is an incredible price point. It will be sure to entice people who were interested in the market but did not feel like investing much into the starter price. Win-win for Amazon as it will sell like crazy and then produce e-book revenue.
I used to read on my iPod touch but now after using a Kindle I can never go back to reading on a back-lit device.
Dude, that's very presumptuous. Don't underestimate Microsoft and what they're doing with Windows 8. A Windows 8 tablet running Metro gives the user a full OS unlike iOS/Android. That might blow up the entire market! Before Windows caught fire in the early 90s, people were relegating MSFT to Office software!
Well nowhere. I have an Asus tablet and I can add Storage, I can use any of the reader apps I want, I have access to adding my own video content, I can play music in many formats, I can read comics cbz files, pdfs, etc, the Fire cannot do all these things. The only reason I even have the android is to run a few apps, if Apple made a 7" Ipad I'd be right there, its a nice size
I think the Fire has a few things going for it, many of them common with the iPad, when it launched.
1) Unexpectedly low asking price
2) Great back-up from a company with above average customer service
3) Large installed user base (iPhone in Apple's case, Kindle in Amazon - although not quite the same)
4) App store, TV, Music all integrated with one-click purchasing - i.e. content driven.
The fire also has, what appears to be, great cloud back-up.
Sure it is not as fully featured as the iPad, but it has a great price and I think will do very well for amazon. I think Apple do need to keep a close eye on this, and perhaps consider launching an iPad 7" variant and/or an 8GB variant - in the interim attractive pricing on refurb iPad 1's might help. However, the biggest threat is not to Apple, for me the Fire all but kills the Android Tablet market. Amazon has brought many of the attractive parts of the iDevice proposition to the Android table and with a killer price, I can't see how the honeycomb and ICS tablets can compete with this.
1) Unexpectedly low asking price
2) Great back-up from a company with above average customer service
3) Large installed user base (iPhone in Apple's case, Kindle in Amazon - although not quite the same)
4) App store, TV, Music all integrated with one-click purchasing - i.e. content driven.
The fire also has, what appears to be, great cloud back-up.
Sure it is not as fully featured as the iPad, but it has a great price and I think will do very well for amazon. I think Apple do need to keep a close eye on this, and perhaps consider launching an iPad 7" variant and/or an 8GB variant - in the interim attractive pricing on refurb iPad 1's might help. However, the biggest threat is not to Apple, for me the Fire all but kills the Android Tablet market. Amazon has brought many of the attractive parts of the iDevice proposition to the Android table and with a killer price, I can't see how the honeycomb and ICS tablets can compete with this.
Yeah. I have the second gen Kindle. I've never liked the keyboard being there. I never use it.
My only doubt. Does the Touch Kindle has physical buttons to change pages? The thing I dont like about touch displays is that they are always greasy.
well not if they are selling this as a streaming device, you are not putting anything on this its all about streaming from the cloud. If you don't have internet access then you're not watching anything
Thats really Hot
Apple, a Storm is comming.
Be assured. I ve seen the video.
It can everything the most folks Need.
I Never wanted to give my Kids (3 of them the iPad - too expensive
With the New Amazon - i really Know what to do at X -mas
Make em all very, very happy
Written with a German ipad2 and a crazy Auto correct Function (deutsch)
Apple, a Storm is comming.
Be assured. I ve seen the video.
It can everything the most folks Need.
I Never wanted to give my Kids (3 of them the iPad - too expensive
With the New Amazon - i really Know what to do at X -mas
Make em all very, very happy
Written with a German ipad2 and a crazy Auto correct Function (deutsch)
And apple products aren't a portal to Apple App and Itunes stores?
You people are quite laughable to say the least.
This tablet is for content consumtion only. This tablet isn't designed with anything else in mind. Great device for people that want limited functionality.
Agreed. I think the design of my 3rd gen Kindle is near perfection but the keyboard is so obtrusive. I can see its use but I have never needed it.
I would still want buttons on the Touch because I like the tactile feel of clicking to the next page.
Kindle can stream Amazon Prime video, Netflix and lots of others I'm sure. It's hardly just a color e-Book reader. Did you watch the demo?
You can directly upload content to Amazon from another device. I stuck about a dozen albums that I didn't buy from Amazon in my 5GB Cloud, I'm _assuming_ I can stream that to a KF[?]
Should be the same with video, posting documents, etc.
[edit]
Sorry, I meant to also add, I'm assuming the Android is "standard" flavor, so you can mount the device and simply copy files over. I realize there's isn't a huge amount of local space, but I'm sure it would hold a few episodes of Spongebob
Why do Apple fanboys always take things so personally?
Nobody put down your beloved Apple or Steve Jobs. Get over it and stop fuming because many people like what they see in the new Amazon offerings! The two product lines are not mutually exclusive, and Apple is obviously the deity that you worship, and nobody committed heresy!
Nobody put down your beloved Apple or Steve Jobs. Get over it and stop fuming because many people like what they see in the new Amazon offerings! The two product lines are not mutually exclusive, and Apple is obviously the deity that you worship, and nobody committed heresy!
So while you are right that some aspects of WorldWideWeb and Mosaic still exist today, I think that what is wrong with their statement is that they are drawing the line very selectively to try to lay claim to the innovations they are citing. They are also ignoring some major browser enhancements over the years.
AJAX and Dynamic HTML went a long way to change the way browsers handled single pages to avoid the constant re-download aspect and many Web 2.0 apps leverage AJAX to pre-fetch things. The early browsers had no concept of the page initiating more requests on its own after rendering it -- this has been a pretty big leap.
Plugins and extensions to browsers as well as sandboxing required serious architectual changes (albeit, with the exception of sandboxing, those occurred about a decade ago).
HTTP 1.1 added persistent connections to retrieve multiple pieces of content form the same server with a single connection and this required some significant refactoring to overcome prior assumptions -- specifically with regards to concurrency.
The introduction of JavaScript and the newer JS engines along with the dynamic aspects of HTML 5 are non-trivial as well lending to some really incredible web pages that former architectures could not handle (check out VW's site on the 21st-Century Beetle).
So if they are saying that previously browsers just stupidly made requests, received content, and rendered it and Amazon is the first to make a significant impact to changing that, then I disagree. Heck their image scaling stuff is not much different than the gzip encoding that is part of HTTP 1.1 specification -- though a nice improvement since gzip cannot compress a JPEG much further, but server-side rescaling can do that. Many of the things they described have been in Opera Mini for over a year.
I just think they need to give credit where credit is due. Their implementation looks great, but to open with "we're the first to really change how browsers function" is a bit of an exaggeration and fails to give credit where it is due. It sounded to me like some of the selective-point-of-view statements that Steve Jobs would make about Apple innovations. Apple does great stuff, but just like everybody else they have stood on the shoulders of others. I think Amazon is doing some great stuff here, but it is not much different from an architecture standpoint than the iSwifter or SkyFire browsers which render Flash in the cloud and then serve it up to a mobile device which otherwise has limitations.
In many ways, I think what Amazon has done here is take the many great innovations that have been out there and put them together in a package with some of their own innovations to deliver a browser that provides the advantages of all those things with a seamless user experience. It sounds very much like what Apple does when they provide feature enhancements to iOS or Mac OS X that may have already existed on competing devices in some form. Apple may make you wait, but when they put it together they make it seamless and they get it right.
Amazon essentially took lots of one-off solutions to the mobile browsing problem (Opera Mini, Skyfire, iSwifter), added some of their own innovations and put them together in a very seamless package to deliver a great user experience backed by their cloud computing power and limitless network bandwidth. Amazon's should say "it just works" to sum it all up rather than "this changes everything".
From what I gather you touch the screen to change pages, so no physical buttons on the side.
You can directly upload content to Amazon from another device. I stuck about a dozen albums that I didn't buy from Amazon in my 5GB Cloud, I'm _assuming_ I can stream that to a KF[?]
Should be the same with video, posting documents, etc.
[edit]
Sorry, I meant to also add, I'm assuming the Android is "standard" flavor, so you can mount the device and simply copy files over. I realize there's isn't a huge amount of local space, but I'm sure it would hold a few episodes of Spongebob
Let us know how that works out for you.
YOu are wrong. Corrected already earlier in the thread. Read the info about cloud storage on the actual Kindle product page, and it says this:
There is no real tablet market in the $500 and up price range, just iPads.
However HP proved that there is a pretty strong tablet market at the $99 price point, when they closed out their webOS product. Lines appeared in front of stores, just like for the iPad. Time will tell whether $199 also hits the sweet spot for consumers to buy a non-iPad.
Amazon essentially took lots of one-off solutions to the mobile browsing problem (Opera Mini, Skyfire, iSwifter), added some of their own innovations and put them together in a very seamless package to deliver a great user experience backed by their cloud computing power and limitless network bandwidth. Amazon's should say "it just works" to sum it all up rather than "this changes everything".
Amazon is learning that if you tell consumers "this changes everything" they all fall in line like lemmings to the slaughter. I've never seen a more cynical technology company then Apple. From the Steve Jobs keynote speeches to their TV ads. It makes me retch!