Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) unveiled the Kindle Fire on Wednesday, a 7-inch tablet that The Wall Street Journal says could be Apple’s “biggest” challenger to the almighty iPad. Much like iPad’s Android competitors, the Kindle Fire’s price is sure to compel consumers to give it a second look: It’s priced at an attractive $199; the cheapest iPad2 is $499.
The Kindle Fire was just part of Amazon’s growing Kindle family: Also announced were a lighter, cheaper Kindle ($79), the Kindle Touch ($99) and the Kindle Touch 3G ($149). Read the full news release about the Kindle family here.
The Amazon Kindle Fire at a glance:
Weight: 14.6 ounces (413 grams)
Size: 7.5″ x 4.7″ x 0.45″ (190 mm x 120 mm x 11.4 mm)
1024 x 600P resolution at 169PPI
8GB on-board memory
Battery Life: Up to 8 hours of reading or 7.5 hours of video playback, with wireless off.
Full charge in approx. 4 hours
Free cloud storage for all Amazon content
Audio: 3.5 mm stereo audio jack, top-mounted stereo speakers
Wi-Fi: 802.11b, 802.11g, 802.11n, or 802.1X standard
New data released by comScore (NASDAQ: SCOR) suggests iPads aren’t just for die-hard Apple loyalists, the boys — and girls — who wait with bated breath each year to see what Steve Jobs has up his turtleneck.
Nope, iPad owners also use other devices and platforms. Although the comScore Mobilens report shows Apple is — not surprisingly — the most popular smartphone OEM (original equipment manufacturer) among iPad users, Research in Motion (RIM) is second with a 17.5% share, followed by Samsung with 14.3%. Google’s Android is not absent from the findings, either: The report examines the Apple iOS-Android rivalry and finds that 14.2% of iPad users have Android phones, indicating the savviest consumers know you can’t commit to just one OS forever.
Further disposing of the fanboy myth are the age profiles of iPad users: The 25-34 group makes up 27% of iPad users, followed by the 35-44 folks at 20%. So while the 25-44 segment are most likely seeking more advanced technical capabilities, they’re also more likely to have the discretionary income to buy an iPad — more so than, say, the 18-24 crowd (15.2%) and the 55-64 group (7.3%).
27% of iPad users are 25 to 34 years old.
comScore Mobilens
February 2011 study
The 18-24 set won’t be without for long, though. The growth of the e-textbook market will see to that, putting tablets –including iPads — and other mobile learning tools in the hands of younger users and marking the declining cost of adoption.
In the latest proof of the shift in the textbook industry: CourseSmart, a consortium of e-textbook providers, has partnered with Pearson eCollege (NYSE: PSO) to offer colleges and universities access to more than 20,000 textbook titles and other course materials from more than 25 publishers. (By contrast, Publishers’ Weekly reported in August that CourseSmart’s iPad app offered access to 14,000 digital textbooks from five publishers. ) The new titles will be made available through Pearson’s LearningStudio, a cloud-based software-as-a-service platform that allows colleges to offer students the option to buy digital education materials at a lower cost.
UPDATE 04-20-2011: CourseSmart announced today its app for Android, CourseSmart for Android 1.0. (Awesome name. Hope they paid that marketer well.)
From the news release, CourseSmart for Android 1.0 at a glance:
Search for a topic within a single book or across an entire e-textbook stack and access the table of contents
Zoom in on text and graphs
Scroll through or jump to individual pages
Read e-textbooks in landscape or portrait mode
View, add and edit text notes
Access to 90% of all core higher education textbooks in use today
Shop for books at up to 60% off using an AOS version of CourseSmart’s website
at an AdMob study that shows 80% of tablets are used at home and they’re used for entertainment purposes. The No. 1 activity: playing games. I guess even older users love Angry Birds. Only 46% of respondents say they read e-books on tablets.
Click on the eMarketer graphic to read the whole post.
Acer announced the April 24 release of its 10-inch Honeycomb tablet, the Iconia Tab A500, priced at a-not-unreasonable $450. With nearly identical hardware specs and $150 cheaper than the pricey Motorola Xoom’s, ZDNet is hailing the A500 as “Xoom Light.” The bad news? It has half the flash storage. Still, not a bad deal if you want to test drive Honeycomb and don’t want to sell your soul to do it.
Gigaom is reporting Acer’s Iconia A100, a 7-inch Google Android Honeycomb tablet, has appeared on the UK’s Amazon site for pre-order ahead of its April 20 release date and is priced at around $485 (US dollars), a bit less the Motorola Xoom, which begins at around $600.
The Iconia A100 at a glance:
512MB RAM (not KB as on the site)
8GB hard drive
NVIDIA Tegra 250, 1GHz Dual-Core processor
1024 x 600 screen resolution
5MP auto-focus camera
2MP front-facing camera
Dolby mobile sound enhancement
3.5mm audio jack
Meanwhile, HTC tweeted Friday that they’ll be offering Honeycomb upgrades for its HTC Flyer when it’s made available.
@Geekhangover We will be offering a Honeycomb upgrade when it’s made available. What feature are you most excited about?
Also of interest in the wake of the Wi-Fi-only Xoom release: A February article from Tech Republic on how to hack the NOOK Color into a full Android tablet. As the story responsibly notes,
if you do this, you will void the warranty. Proceed with caution.
EARLIER: A roundup of e-textbook developments and forecasts, as well as a student’s two cents on the shift in the industry.
Yahoo News looks at some of USA TODAY’s recent efforts to reinvent itself in as a digital destination, which includes a rollout of mobile applications for devices such as the Apple iPad and the new Motorola Xoom, which is powered by Android 3.0 Honeycomb.
From the story:
USA Today’s applications for mobile devices have been downloaded more than 6 million times, including 1.25 million designed for Apple Inc.’s hot-selling iPad. Mobile applications of The New York Times, another national newspaper that’s trying to gain more readers and make more money on the Web, have been downloaded more than 9 million times.
The MSRP for the WiFi model with 32GB of memory is listed at $599 — which means I have to get another freelance job. Now!
Here are the specs for the Sexy Beast from the fact sheet:
Runs Honeycomb (obviously)
Dual-core 1 GHz processor
10.1-inch, 1280×800 resolution display
Battery yields up to 10 hours of video playback
Connectivity — 3.5mm, micro USB 2.0 HS, Corporate Sync, Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR + HID
Network – 802.11n b/g/n
Messaging and Web apps include Email (Corporate Sync, Google Mail, POP3/IMAP embedded), WebKit w/ Flash
5 MP rear-facing camera with dual LED flash/2MP front-facing webcam
Video – HD capture/playback/streaming, H.263, H.264, MPEG4
32GB on-board user memory, microSD card support after future software update, 1GB DDR2 RAM
The Motorola Xoom WiFi Edition (per press release) will be available at brick-and-mortars Best Buy, Costco, RadioShack, select Sam’s Club locations, Staples and Walmart, as well as their online stores and through Amazon.com
UPDATE 3-18-2011: Information for Flash beta and the WiFi-only preorders is here.
Much like iPad’s Android competitors, the Kindle Fire’s price is sure to compel consumers to give it a second look: It’s priced at an attractive $199; the cheapest iPad2 is $499.
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