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Amazon to Unveil the "Kindle Fire"

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Re: Amazon to Unveil the "Kindle Fire"

#31

Post by danilocampos »

blinkingled wrote: post #26
danilocampos wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were you guys asleep when iPad launched to almost identical criticism, then sold 30 million units? The game is not about specs anymore. It's about experience. Amazon has banked a lot of credibility with regard to making great portable hardware and streamlining the content consumption experience. You're seeing this the wrong way around. People aren't going to buy this because they want a tablet. You and a few hundred…

I never understood why people insist on intentionally crippled specs before jumping on the experience is everything bandwagon. Amazon has good specs for the hardware there - it would not have altered their proposition drastically to ship modern OS on it along with support for Email client and many other experience enhancing things that it comes with - UI acceleration, more app compatibility etc. It's nearly free for…

> It's nearly free for them.

Prove it.

Walk us through the level of customization Amazon has done here, explain at a high level the goals and tradeoffs they sought in forking Android, and show how the product would have shipped on-time, for the holidays, by making the simple change of completely replacing the operating system they'd already spent so much time to customize.

I really don't think you're hearing me, here. This isn't an "Android tablet." This is Amazon's Kindle, which will succeed on its own merits, and just happens to have some deep technical underpinnings in Android.

This isn't about the specs. This is about taking some raw material and shaping it into something that meets their goals. They've done that. Can it be even more impressive? Always. And I'm sure at some point they'll merge in a bunch of the technical junk that only 0.1% of their users care about, in the furtherance of the experience.

But I think, out of the box, they're already going to be heads-and-shoulders above their "competition," such as it is.

Re: Amazon to Unveil the "Kindle Fire"

#32

Post by Steko »

blinkingled wrote: post #26
danilocampos wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were you guys asleep when iPad launched to almost identical criticism, then sold 30 million units? The game is not about specs anymore. It's about experience. Amazon has banked a lot of credibility with regard to making great portable hardware and streamlining the content consumption experience. You're seeing this the wrong way around. People aren't going to buy this because they want a tablet. You and a few hundred…

I never understood why people insist on intentionally crippled specs before jumping on the experience is everything bandwagon. Amazon has good specs for the hardware there - it would not have altered their proposition drastically to ship modern OS on it along with support for Email client and many other experience enhancing things that it comes with - UI acceleration, more app compatibility etc. It's nearly free for…

"to ship modern OS"

Amazon's customizations are purportedly deeper and better then Honeycomb. Proof will be in the pudding of course but if you were doing a significant fork you can't just keep restarting over and over to incorporate everything Google is doing too.

Re: Amazon to Unveil the "Kindle Fire"

#34

Post by stonemetal »

stuartjmoore wrote: post #8
blinkingled wrote: post #5

"based on Android 2.1" Ugh. Android is after all cursed on the Tablet and Amazon is just doing their bit. Very disappointing - ridiculous in fact given there should be literally no excuse to put 2.1 on modern hardware. Oh and no Email client and no Google integration if that wasn't enough. [Edit] Consider JIT (2.2+) and low pause GC (2.3+) that they will be missing. Also consider Flash support which is also 2.2+. The…

I'm not an Android dev (yet), but does it matter much outside of the UI? Honeycomb isn't open source, so 2.* is all they can use without talking to Google. Seeing as how Ice Cream Sandwich is meant to better unify the APIs, I don't mind if they skip Honeycomb as long as they do get on track eventually.

When the nook went from 2.1 to 2.2 there wasn't a noticeable difference in responsiveness. So my guess is it was a big benchmark win but not a big usability win unless you were trying to do number crunching on a tablet.

Re: Amazon to Unveil the "Kindle Fire"

#36

Post by blinkingled »

danilocampos wrote: post #31
blinkingled wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never understood why people insist on intentionally crippled specs before jumping on the experience is everything bandwagon. Amazon has good specs for the hardware there - it would not have altered their proposition drastically to ship modern OS on it along with support for Email client and many other experience enhancing things that it comes with - UI acceleration, more app compatibility etc. It's nearly free for…

> It's nearly free for them. Prove it. Walk us through the level of customization Amazon has done here, explain at a high level the goals and tradeoffs they sought in forking Android, and show how the product would have shipped on-time, for the holidays, by making the simple change of completely replacing the operating system they'd already spent so much time to customize. I really don't think you're hearing me, here…

I get what you are trying to say - believe me, I do. I just don't think that at $300 this is a good value. This may be Android tablet or a non-Android Kindle - $300 is not something ( I think ) people will pay for a limited thing that looks like all the other tablets but doesn't quite work like it. At $179 may be you have a point. But as you approach the Archos to iPad price range you can't just sell experience to people - you have to sell experience and all the regular stuff competition ships, you know like an email client! There is no excuse for omitting a great email client at that price range.

You seriously think Apple would have sold as many iPads if they sold it with iOS 1.x version of the browser and no email client, purely based on experience? I don't think so.

So again - our debate here is about price, features and experience. You can change the order but I think excluding any one or more thing at $300 is not really a good thing.

And you and me can argue to no end that it's not Android or it doesn't really matter that it's Android - but Amazon has an "Android" App Store and they sell apps through that and people are going to be expecting to see some apps that they won't either due to them not being compatible or not on the Amazon app store or in the best case just not working good enough due to running on an older OS with deep 3rd party customizations.

And upgrades being nearly free for Amazon - It's Google's code, they just have to rebase and deal with kernel/hardware bits just like every other vendor. The customizations probably are all Java and easily mergeable atop newer AOSP releases - if they aren't then that's bad news already. But let me be clear that even if it wasn't nearly free - as a user I don't really care - I want a reasonably secure and updated OS with no artificial limitations if I am paying $300.

Re: Amazon to Unveil the "Kindle Fire"

#37

Post by megablast »

danilocampos wrote: post #22
monochromatic wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That line of reasoning might fly for a $100 tablet. For a $300 tablet, it does not.

> That line of reasoning might fly for a $100 tablet. For a $300 tablet, it does not. I agree completely. But this isn't a tablet. This is a Kindle . That's why it's the "Kindle Fire" not the "Amazon 7" Tablet Buddy Pro S 1.0." It's going to be exceptionally good at doing Kindle things: reading books, listening to music, streaming movies – and paying for the privilege. They're going to sell a shitload of these things…

Unless it uses color eInk, it is not going to be that good at reading books.

Re: Amazon to Unveil the "Kindle Fire"

#38

Post by jasongullickson »

"While that store doesn’t offer all the apps found in Google’s Android Market..."

With tablet hardware providing little differentiation, software is the main value proposition. In light of this, providing a subset of the second largest app selection is a questionable move.

Re: Amazon to Unveil the "Kindle Fire"

#39

Post by blinkingled »

Steko wrote: post #32
blinkingled wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never understood why people insist on intentionally crippled specs before jumping on the experience is everything bandwagon. Amazon has good specs for the hardware there - it would not have altered their proposition drastically to ship modern OS on it along with support for Email client and many other experience enhancing things that it comes with - UI acceleration, more app compatibility etc. It's nearly free for…

"to ship modern OS" Amazon's customizations are purportedly deeper and better then Honeycomb. Proof will be in the pudding of course but if you were doing a significant fork you can't just keep restarting over and over to incorporate everything Google is doing too.

In that case it would be a huge gaffe on Amazon's part. Amazon will have to be responsible for the full OS and it will be a nightmare for them to integrate whatever Google is pushing out every 6 months, including security fixes.

But let's put that aside - think about compatibility from user stand point. Google's app store is still the main Android app store and is likely to be so going forward. If Google and its partners start pushing out newer releases that Amazon fails to incorporate in their 2.1 tree - users are going to miss out on apps - when they have a 2011 era dual core hardware that they paid $300 for.

Again if this was $100-$179 it would be OK - $300 is what makes this not attractive.

Re: Amazon to Unveil the "Kindle Fire"

#40

Post by rkudeshi »

megablast wrote: post #37
danilocampos wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That line of reasoning might fly for a $100 tablet. For a $300 tablet, it does not. I agree completely. But this isn't a tablet. This is a Kindle . That's why it's the "Kindle Fire" not the "Amazon 7" Tablet Buddy Pro S 1.0." It's going to be exceptionally good at doing Kindle things: reading books, listening to music, streaming movies – and paying for the privilege. They're going to sell a shitload of these things…

Unless it uses color eInk, it is not going to be that good at reading books.

Little-known fact: the Nook Color (vastly) outsells the e-ink Nook.

I was surprised too.

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