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Will Tablet Price War Mean a Larger Amazon Tablet?
An anonymous reader writes "PC Magazine reports that even while Amazon was building their Kindle Fire tablet, it was already planning on a much larger model that 'will be its marquee product and the hopeful cornerstone of its tablet strategy.' Amazon's already begun offering $30 discounts on refurbished 7-inch Kindle Fire tablets, matching last week's new aggressive pricing from Barnes and Noble on their color touchscreen Nook. But PCMag argues that the 7-inch color Kindle was simply a 'beta' release of the larger device to come. 'In no way was Amazon being dishonest with its customers... To be truly fair, many people may never want a screen larger than seven inches because of the associated weight and bulk.' But the author argues that its real purpose may have been as a test run to gather important real-world data for their ultimate war with the iPad. 'After all, as industry insiders joke, all first-generation products, whether hardware or software, are really "beta" programs disguised as initial launches.'"
I want a larger Kindle Fire:
One with a 25" screen, detachable CPU tower, Keyboard, mouse, etc. Oh and it must run Windows so I can code on it.
If it helps save money they can do away with the touchscreen aspect- I don't need that.
If they can manage all that then yes- I want a Kindle Fire.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
So long as they are good quality tablets, not a bunch of the bottom of the market cheepies. I want Android Ice Cream Sandwich with 4G for a good, low price.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
But the author argues that its real purpose may have been as a test run to gather important real-world data for their ultimate war with the iPad
Correction, ultimate war with the ipad 2. Their new ipad 2 killer will be shipping right about the time the ipad 3 is shipping. Whoops!
That's the problem with trying to become the new leader by being a really good follower.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
More quality and lower prices for the rest of us.
"Were you an Android or an Apple?"
Always testings, always exploring, never stopping.
This is good because the world really sucks.
I just bought one for my girlfriend for xmas and one for myself.
"Were you an Android or an Apple?"
"I was kindling and frequenly on fire."
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I tried the Fire on display in Target, wasn't too impressed by it compared to my Nook Color. I have my NC set to dual boot the stock firmware or Cyanogenmod and it's pretty damned awesome for a sub-$200 tablet (bought it for $180 last May before the Fire or Nook Tablet came out). The NC is perfect as a color-eReader-meets-light-tablet even with the stock firmware. Netflix plays great on it, web browsing is pretty good, the app selection is nowhere near Android market, but all of the basic apps are there. The 7" screen is a good compromise between large enough for netflix and reading but small enough to fit in my pocket or my girlfriend's purse.
Anything muchlarger than the 7" form factor will have to compete toe to toe with the iPad and that's gonna be a tough market to get into - especially when people still think of the Nook Color and Kindle Fire as glorified eReaders rather than light duty tablets.
My limiting factor with Kindle's has never been the size of the display.
It has been the size of the memory. I have my entire collection of papers and books on an SD card with room to spare.
But the Kindle, and Kindle DL, can only hold about 1/4 of them at any given time.
Bringing back the SD card slot would attract me much more than a large flashy display.
I think it's a bit unfair to call the Fire a beta product. My experience was It met all my expectations almost flawlessly. I can't remember the last time a version 1.0 product worked so well, honestly. The device is a pleasure to use, and it has become my "network" reading device of choice.
The only feature to disappoint was the Silk browser, which was more sluggish than silky. I've settled on Opera for now, but neither Opera nor Silk have the one plugin I really want: ad blocking. Fortunately, Opera lets me disable Flash, which gives the Fire just enough CPU headroom to load pages with acceptable speed.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Now this I'd really like to see. However I don't think we're going to get this anytime soon, the signal-processing to determine what's an intentional (edge-)touch and what's just touches caused by holding the device is insane.
sig? Oh, that sig...
Yep. I can't browse anymore without adblocking... some sites are just unreadable.
Firefox is now available for Android, and you can use any of the thousands of Ad-Ons, just like you do on your desktop... include Adblock Plus :)
It is still a rather early product, so its rendering is a bit slower and clunkier than the stock browser, but it is improving with each update. Also, no support for Flash yet (which to many is no big deal). You might want to check it out!
Chains are chains, no matter who wields them. Apple's chains are much more comfortable than Android's chains. Plus, the games are better.
And how are you going to hold a bezel-less touch screen without touching it? There has to be a border of some sort. If they get rid of the bezel, they'll have to leave a margin around the screen that's not touch sensitive. Which pushes menus and icons in from the edges. Which shrinks the usable portion of the screen. Which defeats the purpose of eliminating the bezel.
I don't want apps, cameras, gps, etc. Just give me a cheap 10" wifi tablet with a browser and a pdf reader so I can view PDFs while I code. Anyone aware of such a device?
http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/
A sheet of (letter or A4 - I assume you meant one of those) is just too large. Remember nobody carries around a sheet of paper unless it's folded or for a very brief moment.
If the entire point of a tablet is to be right there when you need it, it has to be a device that, ideally, can fit in a large pocket, or otherwise not require effort on your part to move around. This is why I think the iPad is a bad design, why thus far it seems to be infamous as the device you buy someone who claims to love it but that ends up in a drawer.
I'd like the screen enlarged by reducing the bezel on the Fire. But I wouldn't want to see the Fire actually increase, physically, in size. I can honestly say if someone swapped mine for such a device, I'd stop using it, it'd get less use (and that's saying something) than my 10" Honeycomb tablet.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
... but a heck of a lot of people carry around, uh, tablets. Many people would like tablets to stay at the present size of the iPad and/or Fire. But many people would also like a usable screen about the size of letter (or even legal) paper. Such a device would be about the same size as a tablet of said paper and fit nicely into most briefcases, folders, folios, et cetera.
THe best rumor I've heard so far is that the ipad2 will see a price drop to make it more cost competitive with kindle fire. We'll see in a few days.
It is rumored today Monday Feb 27 that...
Apple is dropping all models of the iPad 2 next Wednesday except for a single 16 GB iPad 2 WiFi model. That will be the low ball to bring people into Best Buys, Target, Wal-Mart, Sams etc. It may even be for sale in educational channels as part of Apple's new iTextBook agenda.
Think of this as the 16GB iPad with a huge ten inch iron spike in it to prevent too many from walking out the door. The retail sales people are supposed to 'step' the customer up to a real iPad, the iPad3 in HD, which by the way is going to be significantly more expensive then previous iPad models.
I think the price jump is seventy or eighty dollars on the low end in todays iPad 3 rumors.
I think the new price increase will go a long way to give Android tablets some breathing room in the 2012 market. The only problem I have seen is that most of the Android Tablets are still undesirable compared to the iPad ecosystem. Even Amazon is seeing returns of between 25% to 33%.
Realistically competing tablets still have to sell for less, sometimes a lot less, to move the product in 2012.
That is simply Google's fault and they appear to be trying to remedy the situation the best they can.
Go to any business setting. Many, if not most people, are carrying around tablets *of paper*.
Which shrinks the usable portion of the screen. Which defeats the purpose of eliminating the bezel.
I'm not sure it does. A touchscreen is two devices: a touch input source, and a visual display. This only defeats the touch input source part of the purpose. But the visual display is still useful, and in fact we have a long history of non-touchable visual displays.
You already need space between the bezel and icons just so your visual design doesn't look like shit, so it's partly eating into already-dead space. Then you can fill the other dead space with generally non-touchable content. To give very generic examples that don't necessarily fit with any tablet that would ever be made, you could fill it with text labels, progress indicators, the date & time & battery life, transient notifications, scheduling updates, etc.. Also, it needn't be entirely non-touchable. It can still respond to gross user interactions that are unlikely to happen from just holding it (maybe that's not a good idea, just thinking out loud).
To counter everything I just said, though, I would personally be driven mad by the thought that my thumbs cover content *all the time*. Yeah, it's a quirk, but there you go. That can hold your physical buttons.