Amazon just updated the “Kindle” for Android app to support Kindle Format 8, and it brings a variety of children’s books, comic books, and graphic novels with vivid color and illustrations.
“Shop for over 1000 children’s titles such as Brown Bear and Curious George, and comics such as Batman and Superman. Plus, richer formatting in thousands of other Kindle titles,” announced the app’s description on the Google Play Store.
The new collection of reading materials compliment an already existing catalog of over 850,000 Kindle books and 100 different newspapers and magazines hosted through Amazon’s free application that does not need a Kindle slate. For those that already own a Kindle, Whispersync seamlessly beams a user’s last page read, and any bookmarks, highlights, and notes across all compatible devices.
We heard about this before: AllThingsD’s John Paczkowski reported (via Pacific Crest analyst Chad Bartley) that Amazon will launch a 9-inch version of the Kindle Fire by mid year. Amazon will play off the wide success of its 7-inch version. With the introduction of a 9-inch Kindle Fire by mid year, analyst Bartley is raising his sales estimate f0r the Kindle Fire from 12.7 million to 14.9 million units shipped in 2012. Bartley reported:
We are raising our 2012 sales forecasts to 14.9 million from 12.7 million,” he wrote. “But we believe there is an upward bias, particularly from the new 7- and 9-inch models, which we expect to launch in mid-2012.”
We heard rumors in late 2011 that Amazon was to launch a 10.1-inch version to compete with the iPad. At any rate, we expect Amazon to announce a larger version at some point.
Amazon just released software version 6.2.2 for the Kindle Fire. While Amazon has yet to release an official change log, users are reporting it on the Kindle Fire support forums, and it can be found as an over-the-air download. The minor software release brings full-screen Silk browsing for your enjoyment. We will keep an eye out for other changes. (via The Verge)
Amazon started to roll out another over-the-air update to the Kindle Fire, putting the device at version 6.2.1. The company announced tonight that the update would improve performance and touch responsiveness, allowing a user to choose the items appearing in the carousel. It also gives the ability to add a password lock on Wi-Fi access. To install version 6.2.1, tap the ‘sync’ button in the right corner, or a user can manually install it by downloading the file.
Tonight’s fixes come after many users complaining since getting their device. Our own Seth Weintraub even gave his two cents about the device’s speed in his review:
Amazon Kindles are selling like wildfire, at least that’s the latest from the company. Amazon announced in a press release this morning that they’re selling more than 1 million Kindles per week — for the last 3 weeks. Granted this includes all three Kindles, but Amazon specifically mentioned the Kindle Fire, saying that it has broken records since it was released 11 weeks ago. Not only has it broken their records, but also is the best selling tablet at Target and others reportsThe Next Web.
In the two weeks it’s been on the market, Amazon rose to become a major tablet player second to Apple. The $199 Kindle Fire shipping estimate for the fourth quarter of this year easily outpaces combined sales estimates for Samsung and HTC tablets and Barnes & Noble’s Nook Tablet. According to research firm IHS iSuppli, Amazon is set to ship an estimated 3.9 million Fires during the last three months of 2011, which echoes today’s estimated by component makers who predicted Fire shipments of four to five million units through holidays.
Shipments of nearly four million Fires will give Amazon an estimated 13.8 percent share of global media tablet shipments in the fourth quarter, IHS iSuppli noted. The research firm compared that to the 4.8 percent held by Samsung, 4.7 percent by Barnes & Noble and 1.3 percent by HTC. Apple’s iPad, of course, commands 65.6 percent portion of the market.
IHS’s Rhoda Alexander was quoted as saying:
Nearly two years after Apple Inc. rolled out the iPad, a competitor has finally developed an alternative which looks like it might have enough of Apple’s secret sauce to succeed. Initial market response strongly suggests that Amazon, with the Kindle Fire, has found the right combination of savvy pricing, astute marketing, accessible content and an appropriate business model, positioning the Kindle Fire to appeal to a brand-new set of media tablet buyers. The production plans make it clear that Amazon is betting big on the product.
The Fire began shipping sixteen days ago following the September 28 introduction, “creating chaos in the Android tablet market” due to its sweet price spot of just $199, IHS noted. They previously estimated Amazon is selling the device at a loss because components needed to make it cost an estimated $201.70.
Amazon “is playing the long game”, IHS explains, adding the online retailer is “developing a business model that looks beyond the device”. Rhoda Alexander writes that Amazon is able to cover the losses through content sales as the Fire is tightly integrated with their content stores and cloud services:
Amazon plans to use the Kindle Fire to drive sales of physical goods that comprise the majority of the company’s business. As long as this strategy is successful, the company can afford to take a loss on the hardware—while its Android competitors cannot.
IHS expects Apple to discount the $499 iPad 2 when iPad 3 is released some time next year, allowing the Cupertino gadget maker to maintain its profit margins on both the iPad 3 and iPad 2 while attacking Amazon on the low-end.
While Apple and Amazon, and to a lesser extent Samsung, are enjoying fruits of their labor, Research In Motion today announced that unsold PlayBook inventory will cost them a whopping $485 million. Just 150,000 PlayBooks shipped into the channel in the third quarter, the company revealed. Due to this charge, BlackBerry outages and sluggish sales, the once mighty company no longer expects to meet its full-year earnings forecast, Reuters reported today.
Amazon isn’t keen on divulging sales data for its device. This has been true since their venture into hardware with the original Kindle e-reader’s release a little over four years ago. As a result, sales comparison is quite thankless, but not impossible. As most tech companies commission Asian manufacturers to build their gadgets, supply chain leaks can provide a reasonably accurate guesstimate in terms of units shipped to the channel (which can still differ greatly from the number of units sold to consumers and incur high costs related to unsold inventory, as seen in RIM’s example).
Now, according toDigiTimes, an Asian trade publication, Quanta Computer has already shipped between three and four million units of the seven-inch Kindle Fire tablet to Amazon. The online retailer has commissioned Quanta to assemble the gadget. The $199 Android tablet began shipping sixteen days ago following the September 28 introduction. Quanta is estimated to ship up to five million Kindle Fire units by January 2012.
The sources said Amazon has continued to increase its orders for Kindle Fire and aims to see total OEM Kindle Fire shipments reach five million units by the end of December or early January.
If all goes well and sell-through is high enough, Amazon should have no trouble reaching an installed base of five million Kindle Fire users by the year’s end. And considering the tablets prominent placement on Amazon.com, Amazon’s brand, powerful marketing and ecosystem as well as its penchant for gradually reducing prices (even though they sell the gizmo at a loss), the Fire could easily remain the second most-used tablet throughout 2012.
Every 14 days, Google publishes an updated pie-chart laying out all of the details about what Android versions are most prominent. Yesterday’s chart reveals that Android 2.3, or Gingerbread, now makes up 50.6% of Android’s user base, followed by Android 2.2, Froyo which has 35.3%. Interestingly, there are still close to 12% of users on lower levels of Android. Where the shocker really comes in to play is the percentage of users that are rocking Honeycomb, the Android version exclusive to tablets.
Figures also updated by Google’s team, was a pie-chart showing different screen sizes that feature Android. The chart showed that 3.1% of all Android devices are tablets with a 7-inch or larger screen. If all 200M Android devices are still active and represented here, that means that 6.2M Android Tablets are in the market.
Online-only seller Amazon is sure bearing fruits of its recent foray into the tablet space. The $199 Kindle Fire tablet launched September 28 and it remains their bestselling product across all Amazon for eight weeks running. It’s not much of a surprise, really, considering the product’s prominent advertising on the Amazon sites and its breakthrough price.
Plus, it really is competing with other Android tablets rather than with Apple’s iPad (as we mentioned in our quick review). Amazon also said today that this Black Friday was the best ever for the Kindle family, with Black Friday sales of Kindle devices outpacing last year’s Black Friday by a factor of four. Kindle devices area now available at over 16,000 retail locations throughout the United States.
Amazon’s Kindle vice president Dave Limp said his company saw “a lot of customers buying multiple Kindles – one for themselves and others as gifts”. The streamlined Kindle product mix covers sweet price spots, ranging from as low as $79 (the Kindle) to $99 (the WiFi Kindle Touch) to $149 (the 3G Kindle Touch) and all the way up to $199 for their most expensive mobile device, the Kindle Fire tablet. Apple’s iPad 2 begins at $499, which buys you a tablet with 16 gigabytes of flash storage and WiFi-only networking ($130 more for a 3G+WiFi version).
ChangeWave Research in a new survey polled 3,043 consumers on consumer tablet demand for the holidays, including a close-up look at demand for the Amazon Kindle Fire vs. the Apple iPad. Overall, tablets are big this holidays as sales in the United States increase an estimated 130 percent.
Everybody wants a tablet, it seems. A total of 14 percent of respondents plan on buying a tablet in the next 90 days, an eight percentage points increase over an August ChangeWave survey and more than triple the level of a year ago. However, nowadays shoppers no longer have to pick between an iPad or an array of same-looking Android tablets because Amazon is now the second most-popular tablet brand (people clearly want an Amazon tablet).
According to ChangeWave:
The Amazon Kindle Fire is going to leapfrog the competition and become the number two product in the tablet market, as long as it can provide a quality user experience. But the Amazon surge may also contain a silver lining for Apple, by damaging the tablet market hopes of the remaining competitors in the field.
Nearly two-thirds of respondents (65 percent) plan on buying an iPad, or two out of three tablet buyers. People are loving their iPads and it shows in satisfaction ratings. A total of 74 percent of all iPad owners are Very Satisfied versus 49 percent for all other tablet manufacturers combined.
More than one in five, or 22 percent, eye an Amazon tablet and just four percent plan on buying a Galaxy Tab from Samsung. Apple’s score is in line with iPad’s IDC-estimated 68 percent share of the tablet market. In addition, Canalys projected Apple will overtake Hewlett-Packard to become the #1 PC maker globally on the heels of iPad 3 release, although not everybody is down with counting iPad as a computer. More tidbits and charts after the break.
A few days after becoming available to customers, a few early Kindle Fire owners are reporting Wi-Fi issues plaguing the device frequently. Some users have reported fixing the bug by changing settings on their router or fully resetting it. This is obviously a big issue for Fire users, seeing as Wi-Fi is a crucial part to streaming content — one of the Fire’s key focuses. Amazon has yet to comment, but this seems like an issue that could easily fixed via software update. For those of you who have already gotten their hands on the Kindle Fire, are you experiencing Wi-Fi issues? (via TechCrunch)
It you want access to all of the apps on the Android platform (including all of Google’s great apps) on your Kindle, you’ll want to get the Android Market on there. Once rooted, it is a pretty straightforward process as outlined in the steps below. Is the Kindle going to replace the Nook as the go-to cheap hacking Android Tablet? Expand Expanding Close
If the customized Amazon Android experience on your new Kindle Fire just isn’t cutting it, Amazon is now offering up the source code as an 809MB download to external developers here. Of course this means custom ROMS, overclocked CPUs, and endless other hacks will follow, but first you’ll need a root method. Thanks to AndroidForums.com member death2all110(viaPhandroid), we already have a one-click method using SuperOneClick 2.2, which requires you first have the SDK installed. Full instructions after the break. Expand Expanding Close
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:
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
Yesterday Amazon detailed a selection of apps to be available at launch and mentioned “several thousand more apps” will hit the Amazon App Store in preparation of next week’s Kindle Fire launch. Today they are putting in the groundwork by pushing out an update to the Amazon Appstore for Android app brining it up to version 2.0 and adding a few new features and an overhauled UI.
You’ll notice several UI improvements that bring it in line with the version of the store we’ve got a peek at on the Kindle Fire. Expect shades of grey to replace any hint of white from the previous version, and larger fonts throughout.
New features include in-app purchases and subscriptions, parental controls, and the ability to view any given app’s permissions before installing. Amazon is also promising faster installs and and load times, as well as the usual bug fixes. If you haven’t already, click here to install the Amazon App Store.
DigiTimes is reporting (viaAll Things D) that Amazon has once again just increased Kindle Fire orders, this time by a million units, to an expected five million units by the end of 2011. This follows the company upping initial orders of 3.5 million to four million units during Q3, as they prep for anticipated demand during the upcoming holidays. Expand Expanding Close
According to a report fromThe Atlantic, Amazon might be in the process of readying their own Siri competitor as the company moves to acquire voice-to-text startup Yap. While nothing is official as of yet, the proof comes from an SEC filing that shows Yap has merged with “Dio Acquisition Sub”, a company located in Amazon’s 410 Terry Avenue building in Seattle, Washington.
The voicemail-to-text tech at the heart of Yap’s private beta service (which shutdown as of October 20th) isn’t all that impressive, but the company is said to have a significant amount of intellectual property related to speech recognition. This has lead analysts to speculate the acquisition could be Amazon’s first step into building voice recognition service that could potentially compete with Apple’s Siri voice-control technology.
Of course with the Kindle Fire launch next week, and lack of Siri on iPad, it’s easy to dream up a voice-controlled Amazon tablet experience. Although, it’s likely voice recognition tech makes it’s way to Amazon’s various mobile apps and online experiences as well if the IP acquired from Yap is indeed the start of the company’s venture into voice control. Expand Expanding Close
With the Kindle Fire set to start shipping next week, Amazon sent out a press release this morning confirming a ton of Amazon Appstore-optimized apps will be available at launch. While the Fire runs a scaled back version of Android, the app selection through Amazon’s app store will be far from the full-fledged Android Market. Here’s what you can expect on day-one.
Most of these are expected or were already mentioned during the launch event– Pandora, Facebook, Netflix, Twitter, The Weather Channel, Rhapsody, and Comics by comiXology. In addition, Amazon says there will be “several thousand more apps” and is already working with a ton of developers including all the usual suspects–Rovio (Angry Birds), EA, PopCap, Gameloft, and Zynga.
You’ll be able to grab the Kindle Fire for $199 just about everywhere starting November 15. The press release (below) also provides the following list of other apps already optimized for the 7-inch tab:
Allrecipes, Bloomberg, Cut the Rope, Doodle Fit, Doodle Jump, Fruit Ninja, Jenga, LinkedIn, Zillow, Airport Mania, Battleheart, Pulse, The Cat in the Hat, Quickoffice Pro, Jamie’s 20-Minute Meals, IMDb Movies & TV, and Monkey Preschool Lunchbox.
In a move that might drive more e-book-only tablet users to Amazon (opposed to iBooks or elsewhere), Amazon has announced a new book borrowing service called “Kindle Lending Library”. The move is said to encourage Prime subscriptions, which are required for the service, but could be part of Amazon’s larger strategy as the $199 Kindle Fire prepares to enter the tablet market. Either way,
The service will allow users to borrow from a selection of approximately 5,000 books (up to one a month) that have been enabled for lending by the publisher. You’ll be able to return the book at any time without due dates, and bookmarks and highlights will be saved in the event you borrow or purchase the book in the future. Included in the available content will be 100 current and previous New York Times bestsellers.
Not so fast if you’re hoping to borrow books on your non-Kindle tablet, however. The service will only be made available to owners of an eligible Kindle device that are also Amazon Prime subscribers. A Prime membership is currently going for $79 per year, a pricey ask for just the book borrowing service if you’re not planning on taking advantage of the 10,000 movies and tv shows, and free two-day shipping available to Prime users. The good news is the $199 Kindle Fire will come bundled with one free month of Prime.
It appears Amazon hasn’t entirely convinced publishers of the long-term benefits of the service, as they note in the press release they are actually ” purchasing a title each time it is borrowed by a reader” to provide a “no-risk trial” for publishers: Expand Expanding Close
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.
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.
Great news for students from Amazon today. You can now save up to 80 percent off the list price of the print textbook by renting Kindle Textbooks on the Kindle or Kindle-compliant devices such as Windows and OS X PCs, iPads, iPhones and BlackBerry, Android and Windows Phone 7 devices. “Tens of thousands of textbooks” are available for rent across those platforms, reads an Amazon page promoting the deal. You can choose a rental length between 30 and 360 days and extend your rental for as little as one day. What’s best, regardless of your chosen rental period, Amazon will charge you only for the exact time you need a book. From Amazon:
Kindle Textbook Rental is a flexible and affordable way to read textbooks. You can rent for the minimum length, typically 30 days, and save up to 80% off the print list price. If you find you need your textbook longer, you can extend your rental by as little as 1 day as many times as you want and just pay for the added days.
You can tell whether a Kindle edition is available for rent in the Textbooks Store section of the Kindle app or from the search bar. The ability to rent textbooks in fair terms is good for students, but it ain’t like they were going to keep them anyway.
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…
