Amazon Launches Three New Kindles, Including the Kindle Fire ‘Tablet’

Posted on Thursday, September 29, 2011 by MegaZone

Amazon Kindle Family

Amazon Kindle Comparison Amazon today launched three new Kindle models, the base Kindle, the Kindle Touch (also in 3G), and the Kindle Fire. The existing Kindle Keyboard (and 3G) and Kindle DX remain available for now. You can compare the different models by clicking on the image to the right.

Amazon Kindle The base model, known simple as Kindle, has a 6″ 600×800 sixteen shades of grey E-Ink display with 2GB of memory, 1.25GB user available. It measures 6.5″ x 4.5″ x 0.34″ and weights 5.98 ounces. It has 802.11b/g/n networking and USB connectivity. It does not have 3G. It is 30% lighter and 18% smaller than the old model, but a lot of that savings comes from not having a keyboard. Text input requires using the D-pad and buttons to scroll around and on-screen keyboard and selecting one letter at a time. It is really a read-only device. It is available at two price points – “with special offers” (aka advertising) for $79.00 and without for $109.00.

Amazon Kindle Touch The Kindle Touch has the same 6″ 600×800 sixteen shades of grey E-Ink display, but, as you might have guessed from the name, it is a touch screen. As such the Kindle Touch does away with the D-Pad and buttons and relies on the screen for input.

The Kindle Touch also adds audio with built in speakers and a 3.5mm audio jack, which allows for music playback, audio books, and text-to-speech. It measures 6.8″ x 4.7″ x 0.40″ and weighs 7.5 ounces. Connectivity is via 802.11b/g/n and USB. Total storage is 4GB with 3GB user available. It is also available at two price points – $99.00 with special offers, and $139.00 without.

If you need connectivity on the go there is also the Kindle Touch 3G. It has all of the features of the Kindle Touch, with the addition of 3G support. It uses HSDPA, with a fall-back to EDGE/GPRS, on AT&T’s network in the US. It is slightly heavier at 7.8 ounces, but everything else is the same. It is slightly more expensive – $149.00 with special offers and $189.00 without.

Amazon Kindle Fire Of course the big story of the day, the one everyone was anticipating, is the release of Amazon’s new ‘Android Tablet’, the Kindle Fire. There has been a lot of speculation and hype about this, and a lot of high expectations – and a lot of people may be disappointed. This is not and iPad competitor, let alone an iPad killer. I wouldn’t even call this an Android Tablet, because that implies a lot that is not true about this device. This is not an Android tablet, this is a media access device closely linked with Amazon’s ecosystem, that just happens to be built on top of Android. It is not aimed at the iPad, it is aimed at the Barnes & Noble NOOKcolor.

As a generic Android tablet it would be fairly limited. It measures 7.5″ x 4.7″ x 0.45″ and weighs 14.6 ounces. It has a 1GHz dual-core CPU, an unknown amount of RAM, a 7″ 1024×600 color LCD touchscreen, only 8GB of storage that is not expandable (no microSD), and 802.11b/g/n. It has no cameras, no HDMI, no GPS, no 3G/4G, and no Bluetooth. And it is based Android 2.3 Gingerbread, not Android 3.0 Honeycomb. But, as I said, that’s not what this is. The user interface looks nothing like Android, it is a completely custom UI designed for Amazon’s services. There are no home screens, no widgets, no notification bar, nothing you’d expect from Android. Instead there is a ‘bookshelf’ interface that shows you books, media, and apps.

Yes, there are apps. There is no access to the Android Market, but, unsurprisingly, you can acquire apps from the Amazon App Store. It is all part of Amazon’s end to end integration. You buy your books from the Kindle Store, your music from Amazon’s MP3 store, and your videos from Amazon Instant Video. And yes, the free Amazon Prime streaming videos are supported. You only need 8GB of storage because you have unlimited storage in Amazon’s cloud for all content you acquire for Amazon – another way they encourage you to stay on the reservation.

If you want a tablet to use for productivity and general computing on the go, this is not the device for you. Buy a full fledged Android tablet and install the Amazon App Store, the Kindle App, the Amazon MP3 App, etc. You’ll have access to the same content, just not the integrated Amazon UI.

If you’re a heavy Amazon content user and you want a high-end portable media player that only costs $199.00, check out the Kindle Fire. It will be available November 15, 2011 and pre-orders are open now.

But do note that, while it bears the Kindle brand, it sacrifices most of the advantages of the other kindle devices. Since it uses a color LCD display instead of greyscale E-Ink battery life is measured in hours – 8 hours of reading or 7.5 hours of video – instead of the 1-2 months for the other devices. And it suffers from the same screen glare and washout issues as any other LCD device, so you won’t be able to view it in direct sunlight like the other Kindles. This is not your ‘read a book at the beach’ device.

The Kindle Fire looks like a great device, well designed for what it is. Just don’t expect it to be something it isn’t.

Along with the Kindle Fire, Amazon announced a new web browser, Amazon Silk. Silk is different from most other web browsers in that it has a split architecture. It lives on both the Kindle Fire and in Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Instead of directly pulling all of the content to the device and rendering it there, browsing requests go through the EC2. Content is pulled into the cloud and processed there before delivering and optimized result to the device. Since it is running through the cloud Amazon can also do clever things like cache commonly used content and even use aggregate behavior data to pre-fetch content it expects you to load next. If you’re looking at the front page of CNN they know which pages most users look at next and can pre-fetch that content to have it staged in the cloud for fast delivery.

Amazon is touting this as a new idea, but it isn’t really. Way back in the late 90s Palm used this kind of proxy pre-processing system to digest content for display on their early wireless devices, to accommodate their limitations. More recently Opera Turbo, the Skyfire browser, the Bolt browser, and probably others used similar systems to speed up page loading, provide Flash content to iOS devices, etc. But Amazon’s Silk benefits from their massive EC2 infrastructure, and their likely-to-be-huge user base which will provide them with the data they need for optimized caching and pre-fetching.

The existing Kindle models have also been repriced – the Kindle Keyboard is $99.00 with special offers and $139.00 without, the Kindle Keyboard 3G is $139.00 with and $189.00 without, and the Kindle DX (which has a 9.7″ screen and 3G) is $379.00.

The Amazon homepage announcement is below:
Continue reading →

Posted in Amazon, Android, Mobile Devices, Software, Web | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Samsung Guns for the iPod Touch with the Samsung Galaxy 4.0 & 5.0

Posted on Wednesday, September 28, 2011 by MegaZone

Samsung Galaxy 4.0 Since I relaunched this site in July do you know what the most popular post has been? The Woot! deal on the Samsung Galaxy S 8GB Wi-Fi from just over a week ago. I’ve been getting more hits each day from people searching the web for it, so it seems there is a little bit of pent up demand.

Samsung Galaxy 5.0 Well, this post should make those users happy. Both the Samsung Galaxy 4.0 and Samsung Galaxy 5.0 are slated for US release on October 16th and Amazon has both models up for pre-order. The two models share most of their specs: Android 2.3.5 Gingerbread, a 1GHz S5P-C111 CPU, 800×480 displays, front VGA and rear 3.2MP (with auto-focus & flash) cameras, 802.11b/g/n WiFi, Bluetooth 3.0 with A2DP & AVRCP, 8GB of internal storage, microSD for up to 32GB of additional storage, built-in speaker & mic, and an FM radio tuner. Supported video codecs include DivX, XviD, H.264, H.263, MPEG4, WMV, & RM/RMVB (up to 480×320) and audio codecs include MP3, AAC, ACC+, e-AAC+, AMR, MIDI, & WAV. Basically the Samsung Galaxy Players (as they’re known) are to the Samsung Galaxy S smartphones what the iPod Touch is to the iPhone. The same basic platform with all the features, but without the phone.

The Samsung Galaxy 4.0, pictured above to the left, is listed for $229.99. It has a 4″ 800×480 display (if you couldn’t figure that out from the name) and a 1200 mAh battery which is good for roughly 36 hours of music or 5 hours of video playback). Overall it measures 2.43″ x 4.87″ x 0.39″ and weighs 4.27 ounces.

The Samsung Galaxy 5.0, pictured above to the right, is listed for $269.99. It has a 5″ 800×480 display (natch) and a 2500 mAh battery for approximately 60 hours of music or 8 hours of video playback. It measures 3.08″ x 5.56″ x 0.47″ and weighs in at 6.42 ounces.

By way of comparison the iPod Touch 4th generation has a 3.5″ 960×640 screen, supports up to 40 hours of audio or 7 hours of video playback, and measures 0.3″ x 2.3″ x 4.4″ with a weight of 3.5 ounces. The Samsung Galaxy Player offers several things the iPod Touch does not: a larger screen, expandable storage (via microSD), an FM tuner, and the battery is replaceable on the 4.0 (built-in on the 5.0). And you have full access to the Android Market over WiFi for apps.

Here are the original spec sheets for both players. It seems they’ve been updated a bit for the US release, notably the Android version.



Posted in Amazon, Android, Apple, Mobile Devices | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Boeing Delivers the First B787 to Japan’s ANA

Posted on Tuesday, September 27, 2011 by MegaZone

Boeing Logo It is a little over three years late compared to the originally planned delivery date, but Boeing has delivered the first B787-8 Dreamliner to the first airline operator, Japan’s ANA. And today it took of from Everett, WA for the flight to Japan. In fact, I believe it is still in the air with a few hours left before it complete that trip. I hope I get the chance to fly on one of these before too long.


Posted in Aerospace | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Android Continues To Gain Share

Posted on Tuesday, September 27, 2011 by MegaZone

Nielsen August 2011 smartphone share Nielsen Wire is reporting that Android continues to gain market share in the US in August. While 43% of all US smartphone subscribers use Android, of those who acquired a smartphone in the past three months 56% selected the platform. The iPhone held even – 28% of all US smartphone subscribers use and iPhone, and in the past three months 28% of new smartphones were iPhones. That means in new smartphone sales Android is now leading the iPhone 2:1 in the US.

The real loser continues to be RIM and the catch-all ‘Other’ which would cover Windows Mobile, Windows Phone, WebOS, Symbian, etc. While 18% of all smartphone users use a Blackberry, and 11% use one of the other platforms, in the past three months only 9% of new smartphone sales have been Blackberrys and only 6% are other platforms, which are pretty much Windows Phone 7 and WebOS in today’s market.

Nielsen August 2011 smartphone acquirer trend Also significant, the smartphone user base continues to grow. While only 43% of US cellular subscribers have a smartphone, in the past three months 56% of new activations were smartphones instead of feature phones or basic models. These figures are even more significant in that the three month recent subscribers numbers are a fairly reliable predictor of the market as a whole. The share of recent adoptions using smartphones historically leads the market share as a whole by around 15%. So the pool of smartphone users in the US is showing healthy growth.

The pie is getting bigger, and iPhone and Android are taking the lions share of it. Heading into the fall and the holiday buying season things look good for iPhone (especially if the iPhone 5 launches), positively great for Android, and pretty much abysmal for everyone else. RIM needs to pull a rabbit out of their hat soon, and Blackberry OS 7 sure isn’t it. As corporate IT departments increasingly offer a choice of Blackberry, iPhone, or Android devices, instead of mandating Blackberry, RIM’s traditional stronghold is crumbling.

Via Nielsen Wire.

Posted in Android, Blackberry, iPhone, Mobile Devices | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

TiVo’s Outsourced Call Center is Hiring

Posted on Tuesday, September 27, 2011 by MegaZone

TiVo Logo If you live in northern Colorado and you need a job, Center Partners in Fort Collins is hiring. In fact, they’re looking for 275 new employees. Center Partners is an outsourced call center and their customers include T-Mobile, TiVo, Bare Escentuals, and an unnamed “a fortune 500 credit card company”. 175 of those new employees are for the credit card company alone.

And I guess we know how much TiVo’s front line support reps make:

Incentive-based pay starts at $9.25, but the average worker makes between $12 and $14 “depending on the energy they’re bringing in to work everyday,” said Michelle Entwistle, senior human resources recruiting supervisor.

I wonder what those incentives are and how they influence calls. Calls per hour? Call closure rate? Customer retention? You have to be careful because the wrong incentives can favor getting customers off the phone quickly instead of staying on to solve a problem. Correlation with successful issue resolution and customer satisfaction is important.

I did front line product support as my first job in tech, and I have friends who did time on consumer support for a PC vendor. It’s not a fun job, but it’s a job.

Via the Loveland Connection.

Posted in DVR, TiVo | Tagged , | Leave a comment