The idea that Amazon.com has a larger version of the Kindle Fire in the works isn't a new one, and neither is the idea that it might ship by mid-2012, but a new analyst report just affirms the earlier rumors.
Pacific Crest analyst Chad Bartley raised his Kindle Fire sales estimate this week, basing the revision upon an upcoming larger-screened Amazon.com tablet. He wrote, “We are raising our 2012 sales forecasts to 14.9 million from 12.7 million. But we believe there is an upward bias, particularly from the new 7- and 9-inch models, which we expect to launch in mid-2012.”
Bartley said 9-inch, but we'll stick with 8.9-inches for the larger Kindle Fire, since other 8.9-inch tablets have already been shipped. Moreover, though, not only are we going to see a larger screened Kindle Fire by mid-2012, if Bartley is correct, we should see a new 7-inch version as well.
Neither of those releases would be a total surprise; in 2011, it was at first believed that Amazon.com was going to release two versions of the Fire, but it's thought that Amazon.com rushed out the first Kindle Fire, additionally using a design mostly based on the BlackBerry Playbook and manufactured by Quanta.
On the less positive side of things for Amazon.com, Bartley reduced his Kindle e-reader unit estimates at the same time he raised his Kindle Fire estimates. The drop was from 28.6 million down to 24 million.
Bartley did not explain his estimate drop. But it doesn't take a rocket scientist (or market analyst) to assume that the Kindle Fire is probably cannibalizing the sales of Kindle e-readers. That said, for users of the Kindle Fire, it's clear --- whether iPad or Kindle Fire, the Kindle e-reader with e-ink technology is still a much better reading experience.
That said, if you want to avoid spending on more than one device, yet want to use an Amazon.com device to read an Amazon.com e-book, what better tablet than the Kindle Fire?
RIM has taken an axe to the prices it charges for its BlackBerry PlayBook tablets in the UK - again.
You can now pick up the 16GB version of just £169. It was priced at £399 at launch, and yesterday would have set you back £249. That's roughly a third off in 24 hours.
The 32GB now costs £199, the 64GB tablet £249, down from £479 and £559, respectively.
A variety of retailers, including Carphone Warehouse and Dixons, have just applied the new prices.
RIM knocked £150 off the original prices in October 2011 in a bid to boost demand for the 7in tablets. Punters have not taken to the machine.
It didn't do much good, and just as October's cut followed a big price reduction in the States, so this latest round of reductions comes after RIM discounted again over there.
If you've taken advantage of RIM's $299 BlackBerry Playbook sale, and come to the realization that there is an annoying dearth of apps on the darn thing, you might be in for a long wait for your favorite Android app to be repacked for BlackBerry App World. If you don't want to wait that long, there's a way to get the Android Market on the Playbook, although it does involve rooting the device.
To be clear, the procedure is rather involved, and not every Android app is going to run correctly on the Playbook, anyway. The aptly named site CrackBerry has all the instructions, although the site's name comes from the old "addiction to your BlackBerry" term, which has ceased to be as popular, just as BlackBerrys themselves.
Once the Playbook is rooted with DingleBerry, you can then use an application called DDPB to sideload the Honeycomb Launcher (HCL) app to the Playbook. You then need to get WinSCP connected to the Playbook, which is a long process by itself, and after that, you use WinSCP to copy the Cyanogen Google Apps to the Playbook.
A few more steps, and you'll have the Android Market on your Playbook. You'll need to reboot the device and then start the HCL Updater which will itself start the Android OS on the Playbook. In the Android environment, you'll see Apps on the upper right hand side, and when opened, you'll find the Market in the list of available apps.
It's hardly the easiest thing to do, and it's definitely time-consuming, but at least you won't have to wait for a developer to repackage his app, and that's assuming he even bothers to do so.
Of course, rooting your Playbook, while legal, will likely void the warranty.
RIM has cut the prices of all storage tiers of its BlackBerry Playbook to $299, in its own online store. That's an across the board cut, meaning that the 64GB model is the obvious best deal.
The sale runs over a month, until February 4, 2012. Strangely, although the company says that all the models are currently in stock, which isn't really a surprise based on its sales, it also says that it will take 7-14 business days before an order ships.
It's a strange decision to make all the models the same price. It would obviously push customers to higher storage units. Perhaps RIM has far more of those in its warehouses.
Also, the $299 price for the 16GB tier can be beaten. For example, Amazon.com is selling the 16GB model for $259, with (in most cases) no sales tax and free shipping.
In addition, a purchase from Amazon.com has the added bonus of liberal return policies, in case you decide the Playbook isn't for you.
The sale's timing points to it being a stopgap measure until the PlayBook 2.0 platform arrives in February, carrying (at last) the native e-mail that RIM had promised nearly a year ago. Considering RIM's record with the Playbook, a delay in the delivery of that software wouldn't be a surprise, though.
IHS iSuppli did an earlier, virtual (i.e., "make-believe") teardown of Amazon.com's Kindle Fire, and said it cost about $210 to build. That would amount to a more than $10 loss for the company based on the hardware alone. However, now that IHS iSuppli has been able to buy an actual Kindle Fire, it appears Amazon.com is not in the red as much as thought.
The cost of the Kindle Fire is $201.70, which means Amazon.com loses "only" $2.70 per device. Part of the reason Amazon.com could produce such a low BoM (bill of materials) cost for the Kindle Fire is because of the failure of other Android tablets. Suppliers are looking for a device that they could count on for millions of orders. As IHS iSuppli said, "as a result, these suppliers are willing to cut better deals for Amazon.”
Also, Amazon.com made obvious choices designed to minimize hardware cost. For example, the Kindle Fire omits cameras, something de rigueur among tablets nowadays, and used plastic and stamped housing components. The iPad 2 uses an aluminum unibody and even the $79 Kindle uses a magnesium housing.
Amazon.com also included a lower-capacity battery than found in the iPad 2 or even the BlackBerry Playbook, from whence the external design was borrowed. They also skimped on DRAM, with 4Gbits of low-power mobile DRAM, while many newer smartphones, as opposed to tablets, now feature 8Gbits.
Amazon.com also went cheap on its wireless module. IHS iSuppli had been expecting to see a combo wireless, Bluetooth, and FM module as most other tablets carry, and instead found a cheaper one with fewer features by a new supplier, Jorjin.
The teardown analysis even commented on Amazon.com's "minimal box contents." The Kindle Fire ships in the same box it comes in when sold by third-party brick-and-mortar retailers like Best Buy, saving Amazon.com some money. And the company only includes a wall charger and cord in the box. iSuppli had expected the box contents to cost over $5, but instead discovered the cost is around $2 or $3. "Amazon’s approach was to take out everything they didn’t need," said IHS iSuppli's Andrew Rassweiler.
It's been known for a long time that Amazon.com is taking a "printer-type" model to the Kindle Fire: it's not interested so much in the hardware sales as it is in getting Amazon Prime and content sales, as well as "introducing" buyers to the beauty of all that is Amazon.com's wide-range of products that covers everything from books to music to groceries to electronics.
CFO Thomas Szkutak even admitted as such in an Oct. 25 conference call with analysts. Then, he said that the company is counting on the Kindle Fire to foster the sale of content; he also emphasized the “lifetime value” of the Kindle Fire.
It's expected that Amazon.com will launch an 8.9-inch version in 2012; a new rumor says the company is planning a smartphone, too.
Amazon.com is surprising folks, by shipping the Kindle Fire a day earlier than scheduled, on Monday. The assumption is that the devices will arrive in the hot little hands of consumers on Tuesday. Meanwhile, the Kindle Touch will ship tomorrow, six days early.
In a way, it makes sense, as Best Buy has already said it will have the Kindle Fire in store on Tuesday. That said, even those ordering the Kindle Fire today at Amazon.com's website won't see much of a delay. Amazon.com appears to have prepared well for a massive number of orders, with the site saying there would only be a 3-5 day delay in shipping for orders made today.
Taking a quick look through early reviews, many agree that the Kindle Fire's $199 price might be a game changer. Although it's not as polished and smooth as the iPad 2, it's also 60 percent cheaper. In addition, it has heavy tie-ins to much of Amazon.com's content, including e-books and streaming.
Amazon.com's press release on the Kindle Fire early shipment cites a number of blurbs from early reviews. You can also read a number of full reviews here (1, 2, 3).
Finally, despite what Apple has said about 7-inch tablets, many (including us, and not because we dislike the iPad 2 or anything) believe that for transportability, 7-inches is the sweet spot.
On the other hand, there are negatives. Amazon.com took some shortcuts to enable the device to be priced so low, and even then we know they are losing money on the hardware alone. The screen can be too reflective and the device is basically a BlackBerry Playbook as Amazon.com outsourced the manufacturing (which Barnes & Noble pointed out during its new Nook Tablet introductory event).
It sports the same 1GHz TI OMAP processor that powers the Playbook, but with only 512MB of RAM and a mere 8GB of storage. According to at least one review, although the Kindle Fire eschews the Android Market, it will allow sideloading, which is some small level of comfort.
It's also missing a camera, either rear- or front-facing. But here's the key, as MSNBC said, "much of what's missing won't be missing for long." Also, they said,
"The Kindle Fire can handle about 80 percent of what I want to do on an iPad, for 40 percent of the price.Even if you can justify buying one iPad, you may look to the Fire as a second device in your high-tech home. And if you can't justify an iPad this holiday season, you might consider Amazon's alternative."
What say you? Buying a Kindle Fire this holiday season? Watch a video review below.
It was said that the Kindle Fire might be the first serious challenger to the iPad, and if these pre-order numbers are valid and correct, it's already shaping up that way.
It's still six weeks before the device officially ships, yet a "verified source" inside Amazon.com's inventory management system (known as Alaska or Availability Lookup and SKU Aggregator) says that pre-orders for the Kindle Fire are being made at an average of 2,000 units per hour, or close to 50,000 a day.
In fact, in the first five days that the Kindle Fire was on sale at the time of this leak (Monday), the device had been on sale for a mere five days on Amazon.com's website, and during that time, more than 250,000 Kindle Fires were pre-ordered.
Assuming demand continues, by the time the Kindle Fire begins shipping on November 15, Amazon.com will have seen nearly 2.5 million pre-orders for the device (you can do the math yourself and confirm it). As hard as it may be to believe, that number would rival both iPad and iPad 2 for first month sales.
The original iPad sold 300,000 units on April 3, 2010, its first day of availability, and racked up more than a million in sales in its first month. When the iPad 2 launched in March of this year, Apple saw an estimated 2.5 million units in first month sales.
Granted, although Amazon.com might be close to 2.5 million in pre-orders by the time the Kindle Fire launches, at 50K a day, it would still fall short of the iPad 2, and by quite a bit. That total would "only" amount to 1.5 million in pre-orders in the first 30 days.
That said, compare that to the dismal numbers of RIM's BlackBerry PlayBook. RIM said that it managed to ship to channel, not the same as sell, an estimated 250,000 units in the first 30 days. Meanwhile, the Xoom managed only 100,000 units in its first month and a half.
Still better for Amazon.com, these are actual sales, or at least pre-orders (that can still, of course, be cancelled). These are not numbers being sold into the channel.
Barnes & Noble's NOOK Color, an Android tablet that can be made general purpose only by rooting and installing a customer ROM, only shipped about a million units in its first two months of sales.
The "older school" Kindle Touch and Kindle Touch 3G, which are e-ink e-book readers, are not doing anywhere near as well. Thus far, the $99 Kindle Touch has only seen about 20,000 pre-sales to date, while the $149 (or more) Kindle Touch 3G has only see 12,000 consumers pre-order it.
Amazon.com has never released figures for its Kindles before, so these leaked numbers are pretty interesting. It validates one thing folks have said about Android tablets: at least for now, they cannot compete with the iPad on even terms price-wise, even if they exceed or match the iPad in functionality and hardware specs.
This was already borne out by the huge sales of the "fire sale" discounted HP TouchPad, and these Kindle Fire numbers validate it as well.
Of course, these numbers are all extrapolated. There's no way of knowing if demand will stay constant, but even 250,000 is far better than many Android tablets have done, thus far.
Beware of falling tablet prices, at least for non-iPad tablets. Although manufacturers are constrained by the bill-of-materials (BOM) cost of their devices, they're also slashing prices to at least try to make a dent in the iPad's market dominance.
When the Motorola Xoom was introduced, it was criticized for its pricing because consumers tended to compare it to the lowest-cost wi-fi only iPad, despite the fact that the Xoom had better hardware specs all around than the comparable iPad (which was not the lowest cost iPad, but instead the 32GB iPad wi-fi+3G model). Not to say that manufacturers have learned their lesson in terms of the price that their devices first launch at, as they continue to launch at iPad-ish prices, but they are making cuts, and that might be enough.
The latest tablet to get a price slash (from $499 to $299, starting tomorrow) at Best Buy is the HTC Flyer Tablet. Trying to sell a 7-inch Android tablet, and one with Gingerbread, not the tablet-optimized Honeycomb, was probably not the best move.
Although the Xoom has not seen a price cut (it's at $499 with LTE pre-installed, however), another tablet, though not Android, the BlackBerry Playbook has seen a recent $200 cut for all models, making the 16GB model $299, the 32GB model $399, and the 64GB model $499.
When consumers think of a tablet, at least at iPad prices, for now they think iPad. If non-Apple tablet makers want to make a dent, they need to adjust their pricing model. The Kindle Fire is priced to sell, at $199, although it is missing some important things (cameras, for one), although all indications are that Amazon.com is losing money on the hardware.
Despite assertions by former Apple CEO Steve Jobs that 7-inch tablets, or rather, any tablets with a screen smaller than 10-inches, are DOA, the form factor is still pretty popular. Among others think BlackBerry PlayBook and Kindle Fire, and although the first one isn't doing so well, the second one is expected to explode.
Meanwhile, Samsung, which released the 7-inch Samsung Galaxy Tab last year and more recently the legally-challenged Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, is set to return to its roots with the newly announced Samsung Galaxy Tab 7 Plus.
The new device improves on the original 7-inch Galaxy Tab versions in a number of ways, perhaps most notably with a 1.2GHz dual-core processor and Android 3.2 (Honeycomb). The screen resolution is 1024 x 600, with a rear-facing 3MP camera and a front-facing 2MP camera.
The Samsung Galaxy Plus will sport 1GB of RAM and either 16GB or 32GB of internal storage, along with microSD capability (up to 64GB). It has the typical sensor support (Accelerometer, Gyro, Digital compass, Ambient Light, Proximity).
The device will Bluetooth 3.0, have USB host capability, wi-fi 802.11 a/b/g/n (2.4 & 5 GHz), include wi-fi Channel bonding and Wi-Fi Direct. The device supports HSPA+, meaning it won't be available on Sprint or Verizon unless something changes.
It's slimmed down some, although still thicker than an iPad 2 (8.8mm); the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus measure 193.65mm x 122.37mm x 9.96mm, and weighs 345g (0.76 pounds).
Indonesia and Austria will see the device first, at the end of October. Samsung said the Galaxy Tab 7 Plus will then be "gradually rolled" out globally, to Southeast and Southwest Asia, the U.S., Europe, CIS, Latin America, Middle East, Africa, Japan and China.
The new Samsung Galaxy Tab 7 Plus creates means that Samsung has line of uniquely similar tablets in sizes ranging from 10.1, 8.9, 7.7 and 7.0-inches.
The all-important price information was left out of the emailed press release, unfortunately, though we doubt it will match the Kindle Fire's $199 price point, even with carrier subsidy.
RIM's BlackBerry Runtime for Android Apps, the player that will enable the underperforming PlayBook to run Android applications, is still missing in action. However, details are starting to emerge about the limitations of the player, and they are probably going to disappoint many.
The details came from a RIM presentation at Droidcon, which is part of the Eastern European Mobile Monday Developer Summit being held in Romania. We already knew that RIM was going to curate applications which can run on the Runtime player, meaning only those who "applied" for inclusion would be able to be installed on the PlayBook.
But RIM's engineers explained that there are several features which will be unavailable when Android apps are run on the PlayBook. There are some that probably won't be a big deal. For one, Live Wallpaper won't run in the player.
Additionally, SIP and SIP VOIP are out, as is anything built with the Native Development Kit, apps consisting only of App Widgets, and apps containing more than one activity tied to the application launcher.
Apps that rely on natively installed applications, such as Google Maps, in-app billing, Android's text-to-speech engine, or the "cloud-to-device messaging system" are also out.
No, we already knew that not everything would be available for the runtime player, but we actually expected it to be a result of the application curation. We certainly didn't expect for the player to be so inadequate to the task of running Android apps.
It's something we hope doesn't happen to Amazon.com's Kindle Fire, which runs Android, but a forked version that is highly customized and may prove difficult to keep compatible with future releases of Google's platform.
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