Amazon's 199$ iPad contender unveiled

[Manicdan]

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Amazon...&asset=&ccode=

AmazonCEO Jeff Bezos on Wednesday showed off the Kindle Fire, a $199 tablet computer , challenging Apple's iPad by extending its Kindle brand into the world of full-color, multipurpose devices.

[Splave]

I love my ipad, cause my comps always in pieces. Everything will always be a wannabe to me.

[XSAlliN]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYOgbmLSwyU

For me - all modern tablets look the same but they're not really my thing.

[SKYMTL]

It looks very interesting but personally, I am more interested in the new $79 Kindle.

[pby5cat]

any idea whats inside it?

[Tenknics]

It's a rebranded blackberry Playbook.

It's a stop gap tablet for the holiday season, the "real" ground up, original hardware tablet, will be shipping quickly after the new year.

Calling it an iPad competitor isn't really fare. It's using a custom version of android that is a closed garden wall for all of amazon's cloud services. It's not a normal android tablet by any means..

It's meant to leverage Amazon's kindle and cloud services. Even the web is streamed to you from a cache on their servers, not directly.

RIM originally outsourced much of the hardware design and production of the PlayBook to mega-ODM Quanta -- a company that builds, and sometimes helps design, hardware for name brands. The time eventually came that Amazon's executives decided to do an Android tablet -- far likelier to respond to the dark-horse success of the Nook Color than to the adjacent success of the iPad -- Amazon's own Kindle group (called Lab 126) apparently opted not to take on the project, in favor of continuing to work solely on next-gen E-Ink-based devices.

Amazon's team determined they could build a tablet without the help and experience of Lab 126, so they turned to Quanta, which helped them "shortcut" the development process by using the PlayBook as their hardware template. Of course, it's never quite that simple, and as I'm told Amazon ran into trouble, and eventually sacrifices were made (like using a slower processor).

Although Amazon did refresh the ID of their PlayBook derivative, I'm told that this first tablet of theirs is "supposed to be pretty poor" and is a "stopgap" in order to get a tablet out the door for the 2011 holiday season -- which doesn't exactly leave the best taste in my mouth

http://gdgt.com/discuss/the-amazon-t...ically-is-g8d/

[Mysterfix]

It'll end up just like the nook color, cracked open rooted and running custom roms within 2 months. It will probably be the next "must have" budget tablet once the devs get there hands on it.

[Tenknics]

It'll end up just like the nook color, cracked open rooted and running custom roms within 2 months. It will probably be the next "must have" budget tablet once the devs get there hands on it.

I cant see how a 7" tablet with a 1ghz dualcore CPU and 512mb of ram, with 8gigs of storage being a "must have" item..and its not even an hd screen..

[zanzabar]

I cant see how a 7" tablet with a 1ghz dualcore CPU and 512mb of ram, with 8gigs of storage being a "must have" item..and its not even an hd screen..

it dose have a ti omap so its the best chip out of any currently announced tablets, and the screen is enough to be an HDTV running 720p with forced overscan so its not that low and it has a 169ppi display thats more than the ipad, galaxy tab10.1 and the same screen size/rez as the flyer (but i dont think that the flyer is an ips). so its $200 and has the best cpu/gpu and the only down side is half the ram and storage of the flyer that costs more than 2x more.

[Mysterfix]

I cant see how a 7" tablet with a 1ghz dualcore CPU and 512mb of ram, with 8gigs of storage being a "must have" item..and its not even an hd screen..

Well just look at the nook color and that one was $50 more expensive. They sold a ton of them and its not even technically a tablet with the way Barnes & Noble gimped the software to make it an ereader+ but not quite a tablet.

zanzabar has an even better point.

[Manicdan]

for 200$ its an incredible tablet. since i already have a cellphone for communication, and a PC for gaming, it would be nice to have something for books and video and light gaming (think it will support all android apps or just amazon apps?)

[zanzabar]

for 200$ its an incredible tablet. since i already have a cellphone for communication, and a PC for gaming, it would be nice to have something for books and video and light gaming (think it will support all android apps or just amazon apps?)

amazon uses unsigned apps so i dont see how they would block things unless they shake it up, but then the amazon app store has just about everything the google one dose and amazon has better pricing for media.

but for a media device, i like my psp for videos and music better than my phone, u just need to beable to run homebrue and hopefully with the vita sony makes an app store and has dlna and proper codecs so u dont have to hack it. then for books i like e-ink over a tft screen now that i have used both in that format.

for the holodays this should be golden as is its only $200 this is the one for students or kids or people who are not apple zealots and dont need wcdma/lte but i think a wcdma hspda+ one is also coming out.

[Tenknics]

it dose have a ti omap so its the best chip out of any currently announced tablets, and the screen is enough to be an HDTV running 720p with forced overscan so its not that low and it has a 169ppi display thats more than the ipad, galaxy tab10.1 and the same screen size/rez as the flyer (but i dont think that the flyer is an ips). so its $200 and has the best cpu/gpu and the only down side is half the ram and storage of the flyer that costs more than 2x more.

since when is the ti omap the best chip out? ITs identical to a blackberry playbook and that thing is slow as sh*t

[tbone8ty]

how is this automatically dubbed an ipad contender? Keep dreaming ;-)

[tbone8ty]

I love my hp touchpad OC'd to 1.7ghz ;-)

oh and I got it for $99

thaaaanks

[CaptMorgan]

I love my hp touchpad OC'd to 1.7ghz ;-)

oh and I got it for $99

thaaaanks

same here

[zanzabar]

since when is the ti omap the best chip out? ITs identical to a blackberry playbook and that thing is slow as sh*t

it has the best graphics with the top end powerVR and its got the best per clock cpu, sure 1ghz is slow now but that chip also comes in 1.2 and 1.5ghz.

and the playbook is slow since BB is crap

how is this automatically dubbed an ipad contender? Keep dreaming ;-)

its got better hardware and a better os and looks nicer, but there its not a religious sacrament so it dosnt have that.

[Macadamia]

since when is the ti omap the best chip out? ITs identical to a blackberry playbook and that thing is slow as sh*t

It's not "best" per se. but at least it decodes everything. Try high profile h264 on a Tegra 2.

Given how I guess ICS will not require much more horsepower from the tablets themselves (the OMAP's SGX540 that's 1.5x clocked with new drivers is blisteringly fast, stable and compatible with Android since 2.1), and Kal-El is aiming too high for what tablets need (spec wars just to impress nerds who talk a lot but don't buy gadgets), no wonder TI's getting so many design wins back for the next generation.

OMAP4 is frankly speaking, the new 1Ghz Snapdragon. It's the baseline, it enables cheap tablets and frankly that's all Android will want to focus for a bit: quality, good tablets that are cheap.

I love my hp touchpad OC'd to 1.7ghz ;-)

oh and I got it for $99

thaaaanks

You must enjoy doing really nothing on WebOS! Or watch Gingerbread lag badly. I'll take the Fire any day- at least it's an easy one to port ICS to.

[Aerwidh]

Given how inexpensive it will be, it sounds nice

[Tenknics]

I love my hp touchpad OC'd to 1.7ghz ;-)

oh and I got it for $99

thaaaanks

same here, just got my new case in the mail today, FINALLY a rubber molded case that fits my tp perrrrecctly!

You must enjoy doing really nothing on WebOS! Or watch Gingerbread lag badly. I'll take the Fire any day- at least it's an easy one to port ICS to.

I do lots on webOS thanks tho..Also ICS source will be the first android that is COMPLETELY open source and it will just as easy to port to ANY tablet, not just your fire.

Also Im spent half of what you will on Fire, have the twice the capacity, twice the ram, a better screen, faster cpu etc etc etc

[xellsyuh]

I sure love my Kindle...

[zerazax]

For $200, this thing rocks - and Amazon's services beat the snot out of Apple any day

[bill_d]

hmm

it's just a nook color without sd card slot so its more b&n's problem
now if they get a ipad sized one

[zanzabar]

hmm

it's just a nook color without sd card slot so its more b&n's problem
now if they get a ipad sized one

it is ipad sized in width, the ipad is just 4:3, and diagonal the ipad is only 2" more and has a larger bezel.

[bill_d]

it is ipad sized in width, the ipad is just 4:3, and diagonal the ipad is only 2" more and has a larger bezel.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817...id=DnhcRJnxQvb


http://www.gottabemobile.com/2011/09...vs-nook-color/
looks like the same 7" screen as a nookcolor, ipad2 is 2.7 bigger or 2 3/4 with my tape