TAKEAWAY: So Amazon is about to unveil its new tablet, the Kindle Fire: could this be the real competitor for the ever so popular iPad?
A mockup by TechCrunch of what the Kindle Fire 7-inch tablet will look like
The industry is quite curious about the rumor that Amazon will unveil the new Kindle Fire soon.
This, many suspect, may be the ultimate competitor for the iPad (but we have heard this before about other tablets, and it has not happened yet).
Nobody doubts that the iPad will find a suitable competitor, and that it will happen soon. Will it be the Kindle Fire? We will know soon enough, as, according to recent rumors, Amazon will have the new tablets available for purchase the second week of November.
On Wednesday morning in New York City, Amazon may unveil the Kindle Fire. I like the name. Heck, if you are going to compete with the likes of Apple’s iPad, you bet come at it with plenty of fire. From what we read, the Kindle Fire tablet will be 7 inches and will resemble the BlackBerry Playbook (which has not been so successful). Why make a 7-inch tablet, I wonder? We know that users prefer the larger, 10-inch version. But then, the rumor is that a 10-incher will be the sequel, much like what happened with the original Kindle and its larger DX brother.
More important for those of us who work with tablet design and development: acccording to Peter Kafka, Amazon has deals with at least three of the big magazine publishers: Hearst, Conde Nast and Meredith all have deals to sell digital versions of their titles on the new device, according to industry sources. Business models, say analysts, will be quite similar to the ones that Apple has established with most magazines this year: Publishers will keep around 70 percent of all Amazon sales, and the retailer will share some customer data with the publishers.
We will be watching what happens with the Kindle Fire with great interest, waiting to see if a large segment of the tablet audience goes for this new tablet. So far, the large majority of our clients ask us to design news apps only for the iPad. Who knows? If the Kindle Fire manages to fire up consumers, then we’ll have to consider also developing for Android, the underlying operating system.
Go here for more information:
http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/26/amazon-kindle-fire/
JLo as pop up
It was bound to happen, a good celebrity pop up.
It appeared in Monday’s edition of The Daily.
Jennifer Lopez, performing in Las Vegas, showed one of her most valuable possessions as she turned around during a performance. The Daily shows a frontal JLo and asks you to tap for a pop up that reveals the other side of the famous singer/actress.
Of special interest today
The Facebook iPad app that almost was?
What the lead engineer knew!
Facebook’s iPad App Was Feature Complete In May, But They Won’t Release It, So The Developer Quit
http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/26/facebook-ipad-app-saga/
First paragraph:
You may recall that two months ago, we found and leaked Facebook’s iPad app. What was especially awesome is that the entire app was buried in the code for Facebook’s iPhone app, you just had to do a few tricks to enable it. Once Facebook realized what we found, they took moves to try and shut it down. But it was too late. The app was out there, and looked pretty close to complete. In fact, it turns out it was feature complete at that point.