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Amazon’s Kindle Tablet Is Very Real. I’ve Seen It, Played With It.

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Re: Amazon’s Kindle Tablet Is Very Real. I’ve Seen It, Played With It.

#41

Post by cageface »

Lewisham wrote: post #3

If Amazon are going to maintain an Android fork, I wonder how well Android apps will be able to play with it. It would be a huge disappointment if 2.2+ apps were unavailable (or installing Google Market for that matter). I can see why Amazon has gone down this path, but I do wonder if it's the right thing, rather than doing everyone's favorite/most hated carrier-specific bolt-ons instead. I also hope that Amazon does…

It seems like Amazon is gambling here that most users don't really care about apps that much, which jibes with my own intuitions about the android market. If you have a good web browser and email client the rest is unnecessary gravy, at least to a lot of people.

Re: Amazon’s Kindle Tablet Is Very Real. I’ve Seen It, Played With It.

#42

Post by blinkingled »

* 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.*

MG goes on to say it is smooth and responsive. And I think many Apps are going to be incompatible with anything less than Android 2.2. Given this I would think Amazon will want to have at least 2.2 on there.

Would be kinda sad if they ran 1.6 on it in 2011!

[Edit] May be it is 2.1 - AWS SDK for Android Requires Android 2.1 (API Level 7) or higher. Oh well may be they will keep it up to date!

Re: Amazon’s Kindle Tablet Is Very Real. I’ve Seen It, Played With It.

#43

Post by ugh »

peterbraden wrote: post #24
ugh wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whut? I just happily browsed the web, listened to podcasts, checked my RSS feeds and flicked through my Twitter stream for six hours during a train ride on my iPad. All tasks for which the iPad – or more general the tablet form factor – is ideal. I think your argument is incoherent.

I think your reply exemplifies his argument - you used an ipod to 'consume' media for si hours, rather than creating, which older computers may have been better suited for.

Wha? If I want to create I can. It’s never been as easy as today. You are creating a false dichotomy.

The content I was consuming on my iPad – and that was my point – did not come from a central authority (no more than before when I consumed on my Laptop) and it’s enabled by the cheap tools available for content creation today.

I was listening to one awesome podcast by a guy who made podcasting his job and survives (extremely successfully) from donations alone.

I was browsing awesome webcomics from people who would never had a chance to make their comics accessible to as many people as they can today.

I was reading awesome Harry Potter fan fiction and tales from a lawyer doing his job.

All not possible only a decade (maybe two in some cases) ago. We are living in a golden ago of content creation. To be worried about tablets in that context is – sorry – crazy.

Re: Amazon’s Kindle Tablet Is Very Real. I’ve Seen It, Played With It.

#44

Post by Adaptive »

drivebyacct2 wrote: post #17

Google's applications are not part of Android. Putting a skin on Android and not shipping it with Google apps is NOT a fork. Even if you want to consider it one in a technical definition, it's not a significant one. It's as much a fork of Android as CyanogenMod is. (CM does not come with Google Apps, though they can be added after-the-fact).

You made the most important comment in this thread.

I really would like to see TC clear this up. Do they really mean fork or, as I suspect and as you state, is this just Android without the google apps baked in?

Market is a bigger question. Without considering manually side loading the apps, I'm assuming that users will be able to install google apps on the device as they are, for the most part, all available via Android Market right now.

Given that Amazon doesn't provide mail, maps or any of the other useful google apps, I'm assuming that users will be able to download them from Android Market, somehow.

Re: Amazon’s Kindle Tablet Is Very Real. I’ve Seen It, Played With It.

#45

Post by AndrewClyde »

I think the Kindle-branded tablet will be successful and manage to compete with the iPad.

However, it's not going to win in the way people expect it to; I think it'll bring a lot of people into the post-PC tablet world and introduce a cheap tablet to a lot of people, but it's not going to revolutionize anything major and won't be able to do anything the iPad and/or TouchPad can't do.

Re: Amazon’s Kindle Tablet Is Very Real. I’ve Seen It, Played With It.

#46

Post by starwed »

superuser2 wrote: post #40

E-ink made the Kindle. Tablets are exciting, but reading a novel on a backlit screen is no fun, and if it were, we'd read on our cell phones, because they're easier to carry around. This is disappointing. The Kindle 2 (the model I had) did one thing, and one thing phenomenally well. I don't want my kindle to be a Swiss army knife.

The article does say that:

>Amazon has been working on a multi-touch screen/e-ink hybrid tablet device.

Presumably it's just much, much easier to develop the backlit tablet than one using e-ink. The technology will be there eventually, but it might take a while... :(

Re: Amazon’s Kindle Tablet Is Very Real. I’ve Seen It, Played With It.

#49

Post by trotsky »

Adaptive wrote: post #44
drivebyacct2 wrote: post #17

Google's applications are not part of Android. Putting a skin on Android and not shipping it with Google apps is NOT a fork. Even if you want to consider it one in a technical definition, it's not a significant one. It's as much a fork of Android as CyanogenMod is. (CM does not come with Google Apps, though they can be added after-the-fact).

You made the most important comment in this thread. I really would like to see TC clear this up. Do they really mean fork or, as I suspect and as you state, is this just Android without the google apps baked in? Market is a bigger question. Without considering manually side loading the apps, I'm assuming that users will be able to install google apps on the device as they are, for the most part, all available via And…

It won't have android market access without a hack, just Amazon's market. The lack of a camera (among other things) means it doesn't meet the hardware standards google requires for shipping google apps which includes the market. Not that Amazon would want to anyway, they clearly would like to drive traffic to their store.

Re: Amazon’s Kindle Tablet Is Very Real. I’ve Seen It, Played With It.

#50

Post by [deleted] »

sodiumjoe wrote: post #2

In certain ways, this "post-PC" era that Apple's brought us into with the iPad seems like a step backward. We're going back to something more like the broadcast television model, where a more or less centralized authority produces the content for passive users to consume. These tablets just keep getting more and more optimized for that. I suppose it's somewhat natural, given the way the market works, but it seems our…

[deleted]
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