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Amazon Set to Unveil $199 'Kindle Fire' Tablet
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I didn't see any page turn buttons in the videos, I think it is swipe only.
Which is why I ordered the new "Kindle" and am selling my K3. The Kindle 3 is great but I really don't ever use the keyboard as I buy my books on a computer. I'd rather have a smaller/lighter device with no keyboard than without. And the lack of page turn buttons keeps me away from the Kindle Touch. Plus I want to "downgrade" to the special offers version as it could have saved me a lot of money had I bought one a few months ago...($300 on my MBA I bought this summer)
The Kindle Fire looks cool, but I still have many questions about it (Whether apps/music/movies can be side-loaded or if everything has to go through amazon...) Also, they really should have stuck a crappy VGA front facing cam on there...having Skype on it would have made these sell even better. (I still think it will do well, but without the cam I think they missed a large market.)
I would if I were a buyer, but I don't think I'm in the market. Our iPad is great for tablet use and the only thing that interests me is the e-Ink based Kindles, since the wife loves to read at the beach (i.e., outside).
I'd also rather see her drop a $79 Kindle into the ocean vs. her $$$ iPhone 4
They have an App for streaming music to Android devices. An app to easily access your other stored documents and videos would be a great boost for KF.
Remember an iPad is an iPad, not a tablet. People keep forgetting that. Why the Kindle Fire will succeed is because it's a Kindle Fire, not a tablet. Get it? Motorola, RIM, Asus and the others don't get it. Consumers want a portal to great content, not tablets.
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!
cynical or conceited? there is certainly a sense of superiority in the apple "if you don't have an iPhone" ads. though recently they changed those up a bit and made them less condescending.
To turn the pages from what I saw, you press on the left or right hand side of the screen, depending on the way you want to turn, it's like forward and back buttons. Then you press in the middle to bring up the menu system. The screen is effectively divided into 3.
I think the $199 Fire will be a hit. People need to think outside of the U.S. For many people in this world, the price of an iPad is way outside their budget. The Fire may be the device that gets many more people on this globe into the tablet market at a much more affordable price.
No doubt, will negatively affect Apple. Probably will negatively affect Android tablet makers and Google more. Why would you buy a non-Amazon Android tablet? Plus, I doubt Google will see many ad hits -- Amazon is going to get them, and Google just gives Amazon the software.
It will be Apple vs. Amazon, and the rest of the Android market is dead.
It will be Apple vs. Amazon, and the rest of the Android market is dead.
Remember the "Mac vs PC" ads? Don't see those running for a while. I guess Windows 7 being such a phenomenal hit quashed that. It just seems to me that Apple has aimed for the "douchebag" segment until recently.
Yes that's exactly correct, except the middle touch gives you the present page I think, if I remember the graphic Bezos posted.
If you're worried about greasy displays, keep your fingers CLEAN
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I agree but it's only available for the US for now I think LOL
Durability and Size make this product very attractive to me. I have an iPad1. I love it. I use it every day for several different use cases. Web, email, Video Viewing, etc. I also have a 3 year old kid who loves to use it, so I have to put it in a giant leather Incase case to protect it. In the case the Ipad is very bulky and after a while it get heavy unless resting it on my leg. Also in the leather case it is a big device to carry around with me. The Kindle Fire seems to be a perfect size and a little more durable (based on what amazon says) with a lot of the same features that I enjoy on the iPad. With that said, I'm sold and look forward to having a secondary tablet device that I can share with the rest of my family.
On another note, I bought my 3 year old daughter the LeapPad for $100's. It is a Christmas Gift so it is sitting in a closet waiting for 12/25. For $100 more I can give her a Kindle Fire which long term will be a better product.
On another note, I bought my 3 year old daughter the LeapPad for $100's. It is a Christmas Gift so it is sitting in a closet waiting for 12/25. For $100 more I can give her a Kindle Fire which long term will be a better product.
Ask yourselves why people buy an iPad/Playbook/Xoom/Galaxy Tab. There are many reasons. Some people want to watch their Netflix on a tablet. Some want to buy an electronic babysitter for the kiddos. An iPad is so superior to TV with all the games and on-demand video streaming. I wouldn't be shocked if 1/3 of all iPads sold to date are for this reason alone!
For my personal needs - PlayBook > TouchPad > Kindle Fire
All I need is the best web browsing experience and the PlayBook has that plus it has the front-facing camera. Trust me, had PB been sold as the same price as the TP, most people would end up favoring it. Since nobody has ever used it or owned it, PB gets such a bad treatment from the ignorant or from Apple-biased reviewers all over the web. Yes, I know QNX copied webOS and RIM is in trouble, but still doesn't mean the PlayBook is inferior to TouchPad or its younger twin, the Kindle Fire.
But all three are fairly cheap. Low risk with higher reward value. All three will make great stocking stuffers for the budget conscious who don't want to pay $500 for a tablet when they can get a decent laptop for that or two of those tablets I stated above.
What I like about what Amazon did is they changed the game by lowering the stakes. You can say HP did this first, but that was a going out of business sale. And if you want better, pay more. Thank you, Amazon. By next year, many tablets will cost under $200 with some quality tabs being below $150. Heck, the Nook Color (e-book reader) went for $250 and Amazon decided to undercut them too. That is how much tablets should really cost if all they are is a half-ass PC that can do a half-ass job at actual productivity.
$200-$250 is fair game for most tablets. Kindle Fire will become the #1 Android tablet seller and #2 overall for tablets behind iPad before the year ends. Amazon broke the barrier for everyone by doing the limbo on price.
All I need is the best web browsing experience and the PlayBook has that plus it has the front-facing camera. Trust me, had PB been sold as the same price as the TP, most people would end up favoring it. Since nobody has ever used it or owned it, PB gets such a bad treatment from the ignorant or from Apple-biased reviewers all over the web. Yes, I know QNX copied webOS and RIM is in trouble, but still doesn't mean the PlayBook is inferior to TouchPad or its younger twin, the Kindle Fire.
But all three are fairly cheap. Low risk with higher reward value. All three will make great stocking stuffers for the budget conscious who don't want to pay $500 for a tablet when they can get a decent laptop for that or two of those tablets I stated above.
What I like about what Amazon did is they changed the game by lowering the stakes. You can say HP did this first, but that was a going out of business sale. And if you want better, pay more. Thank you, Amazon. By next year, many tablets will cost under $200 with some quality tabs being below $150. Heck, the Nook Color (e-book reader) went for $250 and Amazon decided to undercut them too. That is how much tablets should really cost if all they are is a half-ass PC that can do a half-ass job at actual productivity.
$200-$250 is fair game for most tablets. Kindle Fire will become the #1 Android tablet seller and #2 overall for tablets behind iPad before the year ends. Amazon broke the barrier for everyone by doing the limbo on price.
This happens to be a Apple-centric website where people who are fans of Apple products frequent. If that bothers you go elsewhere.
Except, again, it has built-in e-mail :
http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Color-...pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=1321411382&pf_rd_i=507846
Go to the link before making uninformed comments. How many times does this need repeating ? All the specs/features have been posted online, there's no need for speculation or spreading of misinformation.
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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".
But again, all you list is the same basic premise we've had since the start :
Take a url, send a request to a server, download content, analyse locally and display graphically. No matter if the request is a AJAX type request or a full page load, if the ressource is Javascript, an image, an hypertext document. No matter if the same connection is used or multiple ones are used, every time, the content is downloaded and processed locally before being displayed.
This is what was meant and this is what Silk changes. It's that simple, don't read further into it than you need to. There have been tons of innovation and evolutions since WorldWideWeb first appeared (heck, at first, there was no such thing as inline images), but that is not what Amazon is claiming nor what they are representing. The shift is quite a big architectural change, albeit, something Opera Mini have done before them and something straight out of the X11 playbook if anything. The server now does the ressource fetching and rendering and the client only displays (only in Silk, this is also selective as the client can still do some processing on its own).
I don't get why you're trying to downplay it. It's a great innovation, built on the shoulders of others who have tried such a thing before. It does greatly help with ressource limited devices, something that Opera Mini has shown us quite handily in the previous years and something thin client computing has been teaching us for decades. It is the Web made thin client (or even thinner than it was). Now we get a rich web experience without the need for complex local renderers.
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What people fail to realize here it has been always Apple to have computers with 1GHz that performed poorly, it has been Apple always that had to compete uphill against the industry and now the tables turned.It's nice to see that Apple with its A5 design runs circles around current competitors.
I love competition.
I hope Apple comes out with an 8 inch iPad at $300.
Also flash is a huge selling point for a lot of people.
The idea is to give away these devices to as many people as you can and make the money off of the content. Genius move, and Amazon is a leader at selling goods and services.
I'm surprised the Fire doesn't have a version with ads as a sleep/screensaver, priced at $99.
So much potential.
What's next Amazon Phone?
I hope Apple comes out with an 8 inch iPad at $300.
Also flash is a huge selling point for a lot of people.
The idea is to give away these devices to as many people as you can and make the money off of the content. Genius move, and Amazon is a leader at selling goods and services.
I'm surprised the Fire doesn't have a version with ads as a sleep/screensaver, priced at $99.
So much potential.
What's next Amazon Phone?
I rarely use the cameras on my iPad2 for Skype but unless the headphone socket supports a headset with a microphone, isn't the Kindle Fire even more fundamentally restricted in its ability to use VoIP in that it has no microphone either?
I am pretty sure the dual core processor it sports will be more than enough to drive your so called business apps, most likely faster than the a5. And I it will either match or exceed the amount of ram the ipad has which is 512. Almost every android tablet has atleast 1gb.
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The a5 is not even close to winning the battle in performance. Have you used a tegra 2 or one of the new dual core qualcomms at 1.5ghz.
Fixed it there for you. I am no fan of Apple or its products. I am simply a user. If something better comes along, I'll switch in a heartbeat. I owe Apple nothing besides the money that was collected on purchase of their products.
This site is as much for the Apple user than it is for the Apple fan. Heck, if the Apple fans don't like us "mere" users being here and not being "100%" Apple, they can go elsewhere.
http://techztalk.com/techwebsite/03-19-11-apple-a5-processor-smokes-nvidia-tegra-2-chip
Yeah I have seen A5 leaving everyone in the dust. Next!
At Amazon's price point, I believe the iPad and Kindle Fire can co-exist very peacefully. Apple got out of the low-cost game a long time ago.
Apple is good at building premium products and a premium price. Amazon is good at building simple products at a very competitive price.
They appeal to different markets and they will both still do very well.
