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Amazon Has High Hopes for Its iPad Competitor

nytimes.com

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Re: Amazon Has High Hopes for Its iPad Competitor

#51

Post by ZeroGravitas »

1880 wrote: post #50
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried the various OLED (AMOLED, SAMOLED etc.) devices? When showing black they are effectively off, so white (or green or gray) on black text is relatively soothing. My main reading use case is in bed at night. I have a little booklight for reading actual paper books, but I think I'm waiting for an AMOLED 8" tablet for e-book reading. It works pretty darn well for my phone in low light conditions. (In fact t…

Sometimes, OLED screens are even worse than your average LCD. For example, the Galaxy S has beautiful colors and the bright of a thousand suns, but it's awful for simple white-on-black text. The glyphs are very irregular and have jaggies. I think it's because of the PenTile arrangement of the pixels: http://pentileblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/pentile-sh...

I have an OLED device, with probably the cheapest version of this technology available, it's using pentile, and I haven't noticed the issue with white text on black though it is occasionally noticeable (though never annoying) to me in other contexts. My device does have a small screen and therefore a relatively high pixel density though. Until the jump to Super AMOLED HD a lot of phones seemed to be putting the same pixel density (and pentile arrangement) on phones with screens an inch bigger e.g. my device is 266ppi vs 233ppi for the Galaxy S.

People seem to get a bit religious about pentile. It doesn't make any sense to dismiss (or accept) it without considering all the other parameters. It's designed to make it easier and cheaper to hit certain resolutions and densities. If I could get more pixels or density for the same money then I'd happily take pentile. If there's not much extra gain over not using it, or not much extra cost, then I'd happily leave it out. It also, for whatever technical reason, seems mostly to be associated with OLED technologies, though OLED does not necessarily imply pentile. I think Samsung brands their non-pentile AMOLEDs as SAMOLED plus and they have them either on the market or due very soon in both big phone, massive phone and mid-size tablet varieties.

However, OLED does have the one advantage I mentioned about reading in the dark which decides this for me. For that reason alone I personally am waiting for a sufficiently high-density AMOLED tablet for reading purposes. Pentile will be just one factor in weighing up my options, certainly not a deal breaker.

Re: Amazon Has High Hopes for Its iPad Competitor

#52

Post by srik »

"AMAZON PRIME" - thats whats being overlooked.

Imagine this. One prime account that would give you netflix like access to all the music, books and movies from amazon's library. Music and Video is pretty much at par with the rest of the iTunes competitors already and once Amazon gathers enough momentum, the book publishers will bow and then Amazon Prime will hold so much value, it wouldn't be sensible to not have one.

Re: Amazon Has High Hopes for Its iPad Competitor

#53

Post by bad_user »

philwelch wrote: post #35
joshwa wrote: post #26

Apple sells movies, music and books in order to sell devices. Amazon sells devices in order to sell books, movies and music. This.

Obvious follow up: then why not let Apple sell the devices and Amazon sell the content?

Big companies would be stupid to rely on anybody else's platform. That's why Google released Android in the first place.

Re: Amazon Has High Hopes for Its iPad Competitor

#54

Post by zach »

philwelch wrote: post #35
joshwa wrote: post #26

Apple sells movies, music and books in order to sell devices. Amazon sells devices in order to sell books, movies and music. This.

Obvious follow up: then why not let Apple sell the devices and Amazon sell the content?

Why not let Apple sell the devices and Amazon sell the content? Great question. It does seem efficient, what with comparative advantage and all.

Because then then that's an experience that's either customer-integrated or concessionary.

A customer-integrated experience means bringing your own food to the stadium, maybe from the place across the street. That's what MP3 players were like before the iTunes Music Store. Dedicated experts love customer-integrated experiences, but they're the only ones.

A concessionary experience means renting the stadium's food stand to the highest bidder. The highest bidders are either cheapskates or have deeper business motives. The best case is that they just want to expose consumers to some other brand. But when the parties have overlapping interests, things get messy and unstable (i.e. Google on Yahoo, otherwise a great win for users).

These types of experiences both have an annoying tendency to suck out loud.

Apple's mastery in creating great integrated experiences is one of Steve Jobs' greatest legacies. It's something great creators strive to do and customers are happy to pay for.

If Apple were to move away from providing a well-integrated experience, they'd be moving away from not only their key strength but their key value to their users.

Re: Amazon Has High Hopes for Its iPad Competitor

#55

Post by saturdaysaint »

joshwa wrote: post #26

Apple sells movies, music and books in order to sell devices. Amazon sells devices in order to sell books, movies and music. This.

Unfortunately for Amazon, selling other people's content is far less lucrative than selling your own high-end devices. I'd venture to say that their only way of making a sustainable/profitable business is some sort of ad-supported model.

Many people keep holding up the videogame console model as a way to beat the iPad - sell the hardware at a loss, profit from software and licencing - but it doesn't work in the era of $1/freemium megahits and ad-supported web apps. Trying to make money off of movies/music/books is even more difficult. Piracy will always be easy and the competition among middlemen (Rdio, Spotify, Google, Apple, Netflix, the content companies themselves) is even more cut-throat than the software platform business.

Re: Amazon Has High Hopes for Its iPad Competitor

#56

Post by ctdonath »

acabal wrote: post #44

I hope that doesn't mean they're abandoning development on their e-ink devices, or relegating them to third-class citizens. The only reason I'd buy a reading device is if staring at it for 2+ hours didn't give me a headache like a backlit tablet does. (And an all-purpose tablet like an iPad still doesn't interest me enough to buy anyway.)

I'm watching this introduction with an eye on the long-running theory that the standard Kindle will drop to $0 by November.

For those unaware, the pricing v. price-drop dates graph has the Kindle on a straight-line path to $0 by November 2011. Word is when Amazon CEO was asked about that, he responded "ah, someone noticed" and changed the subject. How, when & whether this will happen is interesting.

Re: Amazon Has High Hopes for Its iPad Competitor

#57

Post by 77ko »

The one thing I like about Amazon ebooks is that you can set your country as USA, and than use any credit card to buy American ebooks. I hope that continues with Amazon's tablet and the video and other content they'll be selling, as American digital prices and content selection are cheaper and wider than anywhere else in the world.

Of course, the RIAA and MPAA of the world's will be fighting tooth and nail over regional restrictions, I have a feeling Amazon made it easy to bypass regional restrictions because book publishers are technologically challenged and didn't quite realize what happened.

Of course, there is always the piratebay for countries which aren't in the G7...

Re: Amazon Has High Hopes for Its iPad Competitor

#58

Post by peteretep »

tybris wrote: post #27
latch wrote: post #19

I'm just not ready to bet against Apple. I think we're at the point where the only way for anyone to take any significant chunk of profit from Apple's [growing] core business, is for Apple to have a couple significant missteps.

Why? I don't see the precedent. Android phones are overtaking iPhones. Why wouldn't Android tablets?

> Android phones are overtaking iPhones

I can attest that HN and Reddit Programming readership use iDevices at twice the rate they use Android devices, based on a sample size of 30,000 this weekend.

This didn't surprise me in the least. The people I know who use Android are either the people who can't afford iPhones (and kick up a huge fuss about paying for any content) or people who love tinkering with them.

Re: Amazon Has High Hopes for Its iPad Competitor

#59

Post by Simucal »

tonye wrote: post #40
atldev wrote: post #3

I'm hoping Amazon will have a pretty good hook. I want to be excited to buy one. However, the kindle book offering is not enough. I love the kindle, but the kindle app is already fantastic on the iPad. So I don't need a new kindle tablet. Give me something new, Amazon. Or open up the developer program and let us help you.

I have a Kindle and iPad and use them for different things, I found the iPad isn't very good for book reading, it's too heavy, too bright and the battery life isn't good enough. On the other hand I can read from the kindle just like I would read from a paperback. The only thing I would like to see from Amazon is a larger display version that is suitable for technical books.

Does the DX not suit your needs for a larger Kindle?

Re: Amazon Has High Hopes for Its iPad Competitor

#60

Post by ableal »

ctdonath wrote: post #56
acabal wrote: post #44

I hope that doesn't mean they're abandoning development on their e-ink devices, or relegating them to third-class citizens. The only reason I'd buy a reading device is if staring at it for 2+ hours didn't give me a headache like a backlit tablet does. (And an all-purpose tablet like an iPad still doesn't interest me enough to buy anyway.)

I'm watching this introduction with an eye on the long-running theory that the standard Kindle will drop to $0 by November. For those unaware, the pricing v. price-drop dates graph has the Kindle on a straight-line path to $0 by November 2011. Word is when Amazon CEO was asked about that, he responded "ah, someone noticed" and changed the subject. How, when & whether this will happen is interesting.

Bezos was around for the CueCat scanner. He will not drop the price to zero. He knows that would be giving free hardware to anyone who can find out how to jailbreak a device.
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