Amazon Launches Kindle Fire HDX Tablets

New submitter casab1anca writes "In classic Amazon fashion, without much fanfare, a bunch of new tablets just popped up on their homepage today. The new range, dubbed HDX, is available in the usual 8.9" and 7" versions, with improved hardware and software, but perhaps equally interesting is the revamped 7" Fire HD from last year, which goes for just $139 now." Compared to the Kindle Fire HD, the new models feature a jump in display density (216 PPI to 323 PPI for the 7" and 254 to 339 PPI for the 9"), a switch from a dual-core TI OMAP Cortex-A9 (at 1.2/1.5GHz) to a quad-core 2.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon, and a bump from 1G to 2G of RAM. On the software side, Android has been upgraded from 4.0 to 4.2.2 and Amazon added a few new features to their applications. Businessweek has an interview with Jeff Bezos running today too (starting a bit down the first page).

Comments

Death of the Desktop

[tuppe666]

If anyone is still wondering why the Desktop(Including Surface) is struggling...Hint its not the iPad; That is an incredibly powerful device for very little money. Why is nobody but Google reinventing the PC after Microsoft/Apple dropped the ball?

Re:Death of the Desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you talking about? Surface RT, purely by virtue of the fact that it runs Windows RT, is a failure. But Surface RT isn't a desktop and doesn't pretend to be: its software is unrelated to desktop software (except in the appearance and functionality of Modern UI apps between Windows RT and Windows 8 x86), and the hardware in a Surface RT is more similar to a Kindle Fire than a traditional laptop/desktop. You said "Surface", so your argument is not valid. Surface RT is little more than an attempt to compete with other "tablet" OSes like iOS and Android, using similar hardware and software.

In case you meant Surface Pro, you might want to know that Surface Pro sales are doing just fine. Surface Pro isn't anything like the Surface RT at all, because it can run all your Win32 x86 applications. Not only does it have a ridiculous profit margin, but supply actually outstripped demand for a significant period of time. Ultrabooks and hybrids such as the Surface Pro and the Lenovo Yoga may end up being the "new desktop", replacing the full ATX tower for most users, but the Win32 legacy is safe and sound with the new form factor propping it up for the foreseeable future.

Oh, and until a FULL-FEATURED port of Adobe Creative Suite, MS Office, and zillions of line-of-business enterprise apps exists for some platform other than Windows desktop, don't count on the desktop going the way of the dino. If anything, I expect sales of Win32 OSes (Windows 7/8/8.1 for x86 / x86_64 processors) to experience an uptick as people send their ATX towers to landfills and recycling centers, replacing them with something like a Surface Pro 2.

There will be holdouts of course in high-end gaming, HPC, and engineering fields for decades more, for applications where ultraportables with 8 GB of RAM just aren't enough oomph (yet), but while the full-fat workstation may be losing market share, I don't see the de facto desktop *software platform* -- Win32 -- going anywhere. And the high price of Surface Pro won't deter users who know that they need desktop software for which there is simply no equivalent on Android or iOS, and probably won't be until ARM64 is common and typical tablets start shipping with 8 GB of RAM or more (assuming that most of it isn't eaten up by background services that you can't turn off).

Not a shill, and in fact I'm generally not a big MSFT fan, but I own a Surface Pro and have read up on the sales and margins on these things, and there's just no comparison between the Surface RT and the Surface Pro. The former is a complete failure of an attempt to enter into the low-powered ARM tablet market using a Windows-ish interface; the latter is just a small laptop with a cool snap-on keyboard, a touchscreen, and a kickstand. I wish that Microsoft had originally unveiled what we now know as the "Surface RT" as the "Failed Kindle Fire Competitor", and leave the "Surface" brand name untarnished for the Surface Pro to stand on its own merits. The amount of misinformation about the Surface Pro, its differences compared to the Surface RT, and its financial success, is staggering.

You asked about the reinvented PC: well, Intel themselves are driving that in a big way. By continuing to support the x86 architecture on smaller and smaller (lower power) chips, while still having the same advanced instruction set support as the big boys, Intel is providing the hardware support that companies like Microsoft, Lenovo and Asus need to develop devices that are as light and thin as an iPad or a Nexus 10, but with an x86 core, and an OS that can run all the user's ~20 years of accumulated computing habits (also known as Win32 proprietary desktop applications) -- no virtualization, no remote framebuffer, but natively on the device itself with minimal latency.

As for the cost, well, you have a point, but also consider that even the cheapest current-gen Intel Atom CPU on the x86 instruction set runs circles around the most powerful ARM SoC when benchmarked. You get what you pay for. The CPU in a Surface Pro is in a tota