The fine folks over at iFixit have done their honorary teardown of the Kindle Fire, which just became available today. The teardown revealed the device is much easier to open than Apple’s iPad and iPod. Other things to note are its huge battery and shiny metal plates on the back case that help provide protection for the internal components, as well as heat sinking and EMI shielding. Head on over to iFixit for all of the technical details.
Interested in our first thoughts on the $199 Fire? Check them out here. A few more teardown photos after the break:
I’m just crossing 48 hours with the Kindle Fire and have a few quick observations that I think need to be brought to the surface on this great little device.
It isn’t an iPad competitor any more than a Mercedes SUV is a competitor to a Toyota Prius. A 7-inch tablet is an entirely different use case than a 10-incher. At $199, it is more likely to take away iPod touch customers rather than iPad customers from Apple. But mostly, Kindle people will be people who wouldn’t have considered an Apple tablet previously.
The Fire isn’t a speed demon. A few minutes navigating with the Fire is all it takes to realize that there are hiccups. To me, it feels more sluggish than a Galaxy Tab 7 from last year, especially on CPU intensive stuff. Amazon has done nice things with the interface and they should be congratulated on their virtual keyboard (it is one of the best I’ve used), but make no mistake, inside of this case is bargain basement components.
If you are new to Amazon’s ecosystem, there isn’t a lot of content in there. Getting some will be expensive. In my family, my wife has the Prime account and our music in the Amazon Cloud is tied there as well. That means any audio and video has to be purchased or brought over manually.
The Kindle quickly became a Hulu Plus and Netflix player in our house – which the Barnes and Noble Nook can do just as well. Or any Android tablet.
The Silk browser wasn’t impressive. It is slow, (probably more a processor thing here than a software thing). I had more success with the Dolphin browser. Expand Expanding Close
Mashable reports that some Google Marketplace apps are installable on Kindle’s new Fire tablet. A user simply needs to head to the device settings pane and enable the “Allow Installation of Applications From Unknown Sources” option. Then, the user needs to install GetJar.com. The Kindle Fire won’t appear in the GetJar options for app downloading, so the user just needs to select another Android 2.3 tablet. Not all apps will install, and Mashable uses the example of the Nook app. Quite the irony.
We’re playing with Google Maps right now (below). FYI Launcher apps don’t seem to work. It appears that the Kindle is about to be opened up bigtime for hacking in the next 24 hours…. Expand Expanding Close
As promised, Hulu Plus just hit the Amazon Appstore. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be able to be downloaded for any devices (including my Galaxy Tab 7) besides the Kindle Fire (check Android market for full compatibility list). Strangely, even after “Whistper-synching” it over to the Kindle Fire, it hasn’t shown up.
Amazon just announced in a press release that the Kindle Fire is shipping today — a day early — to users who pre-ordered. Amazon is already touting the Fire as their best selling item. For users who didn’t pre-order, they can order the Kindle Fire now for $199. For those that did, expect to be seeing your Fire soon, but in the mean time check out our review roundup.
Amazon.com today announced it is shipping Kindle Fire, already the bestselling item on Amazon.com, one day early. Kindle Fire offers more than 18 million movies, TV shows, songs, books, magazines, apps and games, as well as free storage of Amazon digital content in the Amazon Cloud, Whispersync for books and movies, a 14.6 ounce design that’s easy to hold with one hand, a vibrant color touch screen, a powerful dual-core processor and Amazon Silk – Amazon’s new revolutionary web browser that accelerates the power of the mobile device by using the computing speed and power of the Amazon Web Services cloud – all for only $199.
In a separate press release, Amazon announced that the $99 Kindle Touch Wi-Fi and 3G will be shipping tomorrow, six days earlier than originally intended.
The Kindle Fire isn’t a revolutionary device, but it is Amazon’s most important product ever. [It] takes Amazon’s wildly popular services and presents them in a solid piece of hardware with a responsive, easy-to-understand interface that works. It doesn’t have the iPad’s extra layer of polish and sheen, but with the Amazon brand, a wide ecosystem of services at its disposal, and that $199 price point, it doesn’t really need it. In that sense, Apple’s tablet just met its first real competitor.
The Fire deserves to be a disruptive, gigantic force — it’s a cross between a Kindle and an iPad, a more compact Internet and video viewer at a great price. But at the moment, it needs a lot more polish; if you’re used to an iPad or “real” Android tablet, its software gremlins will drive you nuts.
(The iPad finally has serious competition). If you like what Amazon Prime has going on in the kitchen, the Fire is a terrific seat. It’s not as powerful or capable as an iPad, but it’s also a sliver of the price—and that $200 will let you jack into the Prime catalog (and the rest of your media collection) easily and comfortably. Simply, the Fire is a wonderful IRL compliment to Amazon’s digital abundance. It’s a terrific, compact little friend, and—is this even saying anything?—the best Android tablet to date. Expand Expanding Close
Well, the advantages of the Nook Tablet are falling by the wayside as Amazon signs up more and more content partners at this late hour for its Kindle Fire. Today Amazon announced that the Fire will also have Hulu Plus and ESPN ScoreCenter apps.
With Hulu Plus, Amazon Kindle Fire users can instantly watch thousands of TV episodes – including the entire current season of popular shows like Modern Family, Glee, Saturday Night Live, The Office, House, and Grey’s Anatomy – from top networks including ABC, Comedy Central, The CW, FOX, NBC, MTV, VH-1, and hundreds more. Hulu Plus also offers entertainment fans access to classic TV favorites like Lost, Ally McBeal, and Battlestar Galactica and hundreds of popular and award-winning movies for $7.99/month with limited advertising. ESPN ScoreCenter brings Kindle Fire customers scores, news, and standings from hundreds of sports leagues around the world. Never miss another goal, pitch, basket, try, touchdown or wicket. Whether you follow the NFL or the Premier League, the Ashes or MLB, MMA or Formula One, ScoreCenter offers the most comprehensive global sports coverage available.
How are people going to pick competing 7-inch Androids when they don’t even have Hulu Plus? Expand Expanding Close
Starting at Midnight PT tonight, Amazon will give every new purchaser of a new Hotspot device some Amazon Credit – hopefully enticing them to pick up a Kindle Fire.
With a hotspot-ready smartphone, you can access the Internet on your Kindle Fire or other Wi-Fi devices anywhere.
Beginning at midnight PST tonight and for a limited time, customers who buy hotspot enabled smartphone will receive a $100 Amazon.com Gift Card. Also, those that purchase a mobile hotspot device will receive a $50 Amazon.com Gift Card (Note: for new lines of service and upgrade customers. Hotspot feature for smartphones must be activated at time of purchase to qualify.)
This promotion extends to some of the most desired phones out there, including the new Motorola Razr releasing tomorrow, Samsung Epic Touch 4G Android Phone (Sprint) , Samsung Galaxy S II 4G Android Phone (AT&T) and even the HTC DROID INCREDIBLE 2 Android Phone (Verizon Wireless) , which is available for only $0.01!
Additionally, we’ve heard that Amazon is having a special on the RAZR Launch for $111.11. If the above deal works on that, you are looking at $11 for one of the sickest phones on the market when bought with a tethering plan.
The VTab runs Android 2.3, has 4GB of built in storage and an SD card slot for additional storage and 512MB of RAM. It bests the Kindle Fire with a bigger, higher resolution 1024 x 768 display, front facing camera for video conferencing (with Google Talk and Skype), built in IR blaster, an SRS 3 speaker sound system as well as an internal GPS.
As discovered by Fusible, Amazon has made the unexpected move of spinning its recently launched Kindle Fire (tablet) brand into a seperate company. Found in a filing with the U.S. Patent Office, Amazon has registered patents for both the Kindle Fire and Amazon Silk under the company Seesaw LLC. Both Amazon and Seesaw have the same patent lawyer.
Now what would be the reason? As Fusible points out, Amazon will probably be able to get the necessary investments for the Kindle Fire, and any other mobile/tablet brand they plan to launch.
While the new Kindle Fire tablet failed to impress folks who were hoping for an iPad killer, the $79 regular Kindle has gotten us excited because this thing is now within grasp of an average consumer and if history is an indication, sales should grow at an exponential rate. Conveniently, Amazon has a new television commercial to push the $79 Kindle into mainstream. Clearly they want you to view the device as the perfect holiday gift. The new inexpensive Kindle is available today. Its touch-based counterpart named the Kindle Touch is arriving in time for Thanksgiving, priced at $99/$149 for WiFi/3G variant.
If all of the rumors are true, Amazon has a 7-inch “media tablet” that runs a forked version of Android and will connect to all of Amazon’s services, including its Appstore, Movies, TV, Music and of course eBooks. It won’t be true multi-touch but the rumored price is half of the iPad’s (just like the screen) at $250. Who is making this for Amazon? Foxconn of course.
Amazon is in talks with books publishers about a new service that could enable customers to subscribe to Kindle books in bulk for an annual subscription fee, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal.
Amazon has told publishers it is considering creating a digital-book library featuring older titles, people familiar with the talks said. The content would be available to customers of Amazon Prime, who currently pay the retailer $79 a year for unlimited two-day shipping and for access to a digital library of movies and TV shows. Amazon would offer book publishers a substantial fee for participating in the program, people familiar with the proposal said. Some of these people said that Amazon would limit the amount of books that Amazon Prime customers could read for free every month.
However, the deal is anything but certain because print die-hards are not entirely sold on the initiative, fearing the idea might “downgrade” the value of books.
Several publishing executives said they aren’t enthusiastic about the idea because they believe it could lower the value of books and because it could strain their relationships with other retailers that sell their books, they said.
It is also unclear whether enough people would buy into the idea of subscribing to a vast library of digital books. The service would, however, provide value to e-reading aficionados who buy a lot of individual e-books on a regular basis. Of course, if Amazon can work out fair usage terms and keep the prices low, the general public could take the bait, too. If anything, the initiative could be seen as another way to upsell customers to the Amazon Prime subscription package.
That being said, the very idea of subscription-based access to Amazon’s vast books library raises the question whether Amazon is attempting to kill the library per se. It may seem a stretch, but let’s not forget that Kindle books are now outselling hardcover and paperback editions combined. Also, the service could take off if coupled with the forthcoming Amazon tablet, which will probably be the case.
TechCrunch’s MG Siegler has come up with quite the exclusive this afternoon, which includes almost all of the details on Amazon’s new Kindle Tablet. TechCrunch wasn’t able to post pictures, but they reassure us they played with it — and they said it’s quite the delight, calling it “solid“. Citing the report, the 7-inch version will be released sometime by the end of the year for $250, and if it’s a success, the 10-inch will launch sometime in Q1. As for the operating system, it will be running Android, but not the kind you and I are used to.
The specs for this device are reported as follows: a 7-inch screen, single-core chip, modified Android, no physical buttons, no camera, and 6GB of internal storage (MG notes some of this is speculation). Did you read that no camera part? Wow.
Google’s Android Market is nowhere to be found. In fact, no Google app is anywhere to be found. This is Android fully forked. My understanding is that the Kindle OS was built on top of some version of Android prior to 2.2. And Amazon will keep building on top of that of that over time. In other words, this won’t be getting “Honeycomb” or “Ice Cream Sandwich” — or if it does, users will never know it because that will only be the underpinnings of the OS. Any visual changes will be all Amazon.
According to the New York Post (viaBGR), Amazon is getting ready to launch their rumored Android-powered tablets with a price tag “hundreds less” than Apple’s current $499 base model iPad 2. “Hundreds less” sounds a lot like $299.
The devices, expected to launch sometime in October, will more than likely be the result of the entry-level tablet codenamed “Coyote” and it’s pro-model counterpart the NVIDIA T30 Kal-El powered “Hollywood”. We told you about these devices back in May, which will most likely be powered by a highly customized Amazon version of Android (bringing with it Amazon services like the Appstore, Kindle eBook store, Amazon Videos, music and possibly brought together by the Cloud Drive).
Amazon is clearly prepping a huge move into the tablet market. We reported this week that the company signed up a third touch panel supplier, and that was after recently becoming the second largest buyer of tablet-related parts – without yet having released a tablet. Expand Expanding Close
The Wall Street Journal is reporting Amazon will be selling a tablet by October, to compete with Apple’s iPad. While the details are sketchy as of now, WSJ is saying the tablet will have a 9-inch screen and will run Android. Oddly enough, the tablet will not feature a back camera. Lastly, Amazon won’t be building the tablet themselves, but will outsource to a manufacturer in Asia.
Amazon’s tablet will have a roughly nine-inch screen and will run on Google’s Android platform, said people familiar with the device. Unlike the iPad, it won’t have a camera, one of these people said. While the pricing and distribution of the device is unclear, the online retailer won’t design the tablet itself. It also is outsourcing production to an Asian manufacturer, the people said. One of the people said the company is working on another model, with Amazon’s own design, that could be released next year.
There will also be two eReaders before Christmas, one touch and one at a significantly reduced cost. Along with the tablet in October, there is word that we can be seeing another tablet designed by Amazon themselves in 2012. Expand Expanding Close
I see these things from time to time on 9to5Toys and wonder how the heck they can make any type of tablet with a 7-inch screen $90.
The one review it does get on Amazon sums it up pretty well:
While the unit does work. It’s slow, and sometimes the touchscreen is unresponsive to touch commands. I basically have to press really hard on the screen for it to take commands.
It does a poor job streaming video from youtube.
My Samsung Captivate, cell phone is faster than this unit.
Overall:
Pros: Works, great for web surfing low media content sites, great to use as a picture frame,
Cons: Slow, Touch screen not accurate/responsive.
So, it would appear that you are pretty much buying a photoframe with a battery and a resistive touch screen (enclosed stylus). Still, for $90…
Online retailer Amazon just announced that Kindle books have surpassed print books in terms of sales. Folks are now buying more Kindle books than their hardcover and paperback counterparts combined. Amazon said that for every 100 print books customers have picked up since April 1, they have sold 105 Kindle books. The figure excludes free Kindle books and includes hardcover and paperback books where there is no Kindle edition. More amazing facts below the fold…
