Whether or not the Kindle Fire has seriously affected iPad sales, the device has at least severely impacted Android tablet sales. According to Strategy Analytics, which released the earlier report indicating Android tablets are now approaching 40 percent market share, of that number, the Kindle Fire and B&N's Nook have about 40 percent, themselves.
This is just a guesstimate, by S.A.'s report author Peter King. Strategy Analytics hasn’t released its Q4 tablet sales estimates with a breakdown for region and vendor but is expected to do so in about a week.
So if the Kindle Fire and Nook have about 40 percent of the report's 39.1 percent that Android tablets hold, that would be about 15.6 percent. Not bad for devices that launched late last year.
Also not bad for devices that don't use "official" versions of Android. They are forked versions, highly customized, and the tablets don't even have access to the Android Market because of that (though it's doubtful either vendor really cares).
So how is the Kindle Fire, for one, doing this? Flurry Analytics has a great analysis that echoes what we've said before: just watch an Android commercial and you'll see it focus on the power of the device and specs.
Watch an iPad commercial and you'll see the company focus instead on the "experience" and content.
That's what Amazon.com is doing: what can you do with the device, not what IS the device. Flurry notes that Amazon.com's Kindle Fire gets 2.5x as many paid downloads as does the first Android tablet, the Samsung Galaxy Tab.
It's as we said earlier, and why Amazon.com is content with losing money on the hardware of the K8indle Fire. It's taken the approach that printer manufacturers take: the money is made on the consumables (paper, ink / toner), not the printer itself.
It's true, though, that a company like Samsung doesn't have a giant Internet retail store to use, like Amazon.com does.
Employee discounts aren't a new thing around Silicon Valley --- and elsewhere --- but at Wednesday's Apple Town Hall meeting the company unveiled a couple of nice new ones.
The Town Hall was set up to discuss Apple's boffo fiscal Q1 2012 (calendar year Q4 2011) with employees, along with its new education initiative. CEO Tim Cook announced that Apple employees will soon be able to get $250 discounts on the purchase of a new iPad (basically half the price of the lowest tier) and $500 discounts on new Mac (except the Mac mini, which is nearly at that price point anyway, starting at $599).
The new discount program will kick-off roughly in June of 2012.
Don't expect any friends you have at Apple to be able to help you out with discounted hardware, though.
The new discount program will officially kickoff at some point during June 2012. Apple employees may only use this discount only once every three years, and must have been working for Apple for at least 90 days.
Apple employees currently have a 25 percent discount on Macs.
Despite losing about $2 to $3 on the hardware, Amazon.com is making well over $100 on average per Kindle Fire sold, according to estimates by RBC Capital analyst Ross Sandler.
Naturally, these are just estimates. And just as naturally, we'll probably never get exact figures from typically secretive Amazon.com. But here's how Sandler breaks things down, in a research note to clients: "Our analysis assigns a cumulative lifetime operating income per unit of $136, with a cumulative operating margin of over 20 percent."
In other words, subtract the $2 to $3 Amazon.com loses on the hardware, and it still makes about $130 from add-on sales. That could be a somewhat princely sum for Amazon.com's bottom line if the Internet retailer sold the estimate 3-4 million Sandler believes (which is in line with most estimates).
According to Sandler's survey, which is how he came up with his estimate, about 80 percent of Fire owners have purchased e-books. Of those, 58 percent bought more than three of e-books within the first 60 days of Fire ownership.
Sandler extrapolates that to mean that the typical Kindle Fire owner will buy five e-books per quarter, which means about $15 net per quarter for Amazon, assuming an average e-book price of $10.
The rest of the add-ons are most apps. Two-thirds of those surveyed had purchased at least one app, and 41 percent claimed to have purchased three or more. Sandler estimated that the typical Kindle Fire owner will buy three apps per quarter, generating another $9 for Amazon.com. He's not, of course, assuming that folks will "buy" only FAOTD apps.
Other interesting factoids from the survey: the most frequent use for the Kindle Fire was e-book reading (no surprise there), at 71 percent. In second was browsing the Web, at 39 percent. Playing games came in at 29 percent, and using apps (hey, games are apps, guys), 20 percent. Video streaming was only mentioned by 13 percent of those surveyed.
Good but perhaps not as good as Amazon.com might have hoped is that 26 percent of the Kindle Fire owners surveyed said they had used their Kindle Fire to buy physical goods on Amazon.com. Of those, one-third said the purchases were incremental to what they would have purchased on the site anyway. Also, of those, 51 percent said that increased their physical purchases on Amazon.com “slightly to significantly” due to owning their Kindle Fire.
If you subscribe to DirecTV, and are in the market for a new HDTV, you might just be able to toss your a lot of your DirecTV hardware: Samsung's 2012 line of Smart TVs can work with a compatible DirecTV DVR without the need for additional set-top boxes.
The announcement followed by one day rival satellite provide Dish TV's unveiling of DVR "extender" devices it calls "Joeys," which connect TVs wirelessly to a base DVR unit. However, with the Samsung Smart TVs, no additional hardware is necessary.
Samsung and DirecTV are both founding members of the RVU Alliance. The other founding members are Cisco, Broadcom and Verizon; the Alliance was founded to manage the RVU protocol standard which is used by manufacturers of consumer electronics to allow home entertainment devices to share their content across a home network.
Samsung has embedded the RVU protocol into its 2012 Smart TVs. The protocol will work with DirecTV's five-tuner HR34 Home Media Center HD-DVR. Samsung plans to ship its RVU-compatible Smart TVs in the spring.
Samsung has just distributed the worst news of this Ice Cream Sandwich upgrade cycle: the popular Galaxy S smartphone that sold 10 million units last year and the 7-inch Galaxy Tab tablet won't be upgraded to Android 4.0. The company's argument is that they lack sufficient RAM and ROM to run the new OS alongside TouchWiz and other "experience-enhancing" software. This will come as a massive blow to the great many users of the Galaxy S, who would have rightly expected the 1GHz Hummingbird processor and accompanying memory to be able to handle ICS — it's the same hardware as you'll find inside the Nexus S, and that phone is receiving Android 4.0 over the air right now.
Samsung addresses that inconsistency by again pointing to the differing software provision; the Nexus S only has to run the basic Android OS, whereas the Galaxy S has to deliver TouchWiz, carrier services, video calling software, and, in some markets, mobile TV.
HTC had this exact same issue when upgrading the Desire to Gingerbread a few months back, and after some equivocation, it was forced to disable some functions of its own Android skin, Sense, in order to make the upgrade fit. So Samsung isn't alone in making its users suffer for buying a skinned Android device.
Online retailer TigerDirect.com is unleashing the lion's share (pun intended) of its remaining HP Touchpads at 2:30 p.m. EDT, 11:30 a.m. PDT. There will be a limited supply, and the site expects them to sell out in 5-10 minutes.
The deal can only be accessed at this link (which was dead, but now has a countdown placeholder page).
According to the site, these are 32MB models. Buyers will get more than just the TouchPad, but extras as well.
HP 32GB TouchPad
Belkin 10.1" Tablet Case
Belkin FlipBlade Tablet Stand
Creative Labs D80 Bluetooth Speakers
(Bonus: HP 16GB USB Flash Drive)
The price: $279.
You'll recall earlier that HP sold out its TouchPads at the fire sale price of $99 for 16GB and $149 for 32GB. This is obviously higher priced, but does include a number of extras.
HP's TouchPad is now available for pre-order in AT&T 4G form, although it looks like the price is sans carrier subsidy. The Amazon.com listing shows a price of $699.99 (but at least with Amazon Prime available).
This pricing is probably going to draw criticism despite the fact that it matches up well with a similarly equipped iPad (32GB, 3G vs. the TouchPad's 4G), which would be priced at $729.
The earlier wi-fi only TouchPad debuted on July 1st at $499 for 16GB and $599 for 32GB (both of those are available for $100 less at Amazon.com, currently). That device sported a dual-core 1.2Ghz CPU, but the new AT&T version will come with a faster 1.5GHz processor, 4G HSPA+ support, and webOS 3.0.2.
It is assumed, but not guaranteed, that the TouchPad will have some sort of carrier subsidy, as well, if a customer signs up for a two-year contract. That could make the price more attractive.
Although the TouchPad and Android tablets like the Xoom or Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 may, in fact our-spec the hardware of the iPad 2, the iPad 2 has something they will never have: iOS.
Dell has quietly pulled the Streak 5 tablet from its website and from any retail stores, as well. It's not a recall per se, but it's believed that Dell is making changes and improvements to the product, unrelated to the software (i.e., hardware).
For a while, consumers could still find the item on Dell's site, but if they tried to order it, they would get the following error message:
Sorry, but this item is no longer available for purchase online. Please contact your sales representative for details on how to order.
The site has now been updated to simply say the Streak is "out of stock."
Since the device isn't exactly a super-hot seller, the first rumor is that it was end-of-lifed. It is not, however, gone forever. Instead, according to customer service, the Streak has been pulled while it receives an update.
The only information given so far is that whatever the issue is, it's not related to Android. It should be back on sale sometime in early August, according to reports.
Blaze Mobile said on Friday that it has been awarded a patent for a sticker that allows support of NFC (near-field communications) technology without the NFC hardware being directly available in the handset.
It's an interesting development. You'll recall that in May, Google introduced its Google Wallet service. The company added that in order to work on devices that did not have NFC built-into them, the company would use stickers, much like the ones that Blaze has just received a patent on.
Blaze Mobile currently has an iPhone app, and also a Java-based app for feature phones.
The patent will certainly help the company. CEO Michelle Fisher said that Blaze's NFC sticker technology has been used without credit. She added, "Blaze is not in competition with Google's Nexus NFC phone, or any other NFC phone. We offer consumers an alternative so they do not have to buy a new phone, or wait until more NFC phones are released."
While more phones will surely be released with NFC technology built-in, Google, which has been heavily pushing NFC with its Google Wallet service, estimates that even by 2014, only 50 percent of handsets will have NFC chips embedded. That leaves Blaze Mobile plenty of time to garner revenue.
Blaze Mobile said on Friday that it has been awarded a patent for a sticker that allows support of NFC (near-field communications) technology without the NFC hardware being directly available in the handset.
It's an interesting development. You'll recall that in May, Google introduced its Google Wallet service. The company added that in order to work on devices that did not have NFC built-into them, the company would use stickers, much like the ones that Blaze has just received a patent on.
Blaze Mobile currently has an iPhone app, and also a Java-based app for feature phones.
The patent will certainly help the company. CEO Michelle Fisher said that Blaze's NFC sticker technology has been used without credit. She added, "Blaze is not in competition with Google's Nexus NFC phone, or any other NFC phone. We offer consumers an alternative so they do not have to buy a new phone, or wait until more NFC phones are released."
While more phones will surely be released with NFC technology built-in, Google, which has been heavily pushing NFC with its Google Wallet service, estimates that even by 2014, only 50 percent of handsets will have NFC chips embedded. That leaves Blaze Mobile plenty of time to garner revenue.
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