Kindle Fire

If you’re planning to wait for the next Kindle Fire, you might want to be prepared to be overwhelmed with choices. Taiwan Economic News is reporting that the retail giant has 3 different tablets in the works, with 3 different screens and 3 different price points.

Details are scarce on the price and release date, but rumor has it that there will be two 7″ tablets (with 1024×600 and 1024×800 screens) and a high end 8.9″ tablet with a high resolution display (1920×1200). If that last one is true then the larger Kindle Fire would have a pixel density almost as high as the new iPad (255 vs 264).

TEN has reported that “Amazon decided to expand cooperation with Taiwanese suppliers”. Quanta is going to be assembling the two 7″ tablets, and Foxconn is also named as building one of the 7″ models. These tablets are rumored to be coming out later this year.

Taiwan Economic News

 

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Now that we’ve seen the new iPad it’s time to start speculating about other new gadget. To wit, the Kindle Fire.

Digitimes is inventing more rumors today about the Kindle Fire. According to their sources, Amazon is planning to release a 7″ and 10″ Kindle Fire this year. The ship date hasn’t been named, but it has been vaguely narrowed down to the second half of 2012. They’re also now denying the rumored 8.9″ Kindle Fire, claiming that it has now been replaced by the 10″ model.

So what proof do they have? They have the same strength of evidence that they had for the Kindle with the color E-ink screen. None.

But it is an interesting rumor, isn’t it?

If you’re like me and you cannot stop at just a single tablet, I have some good news for you. Walmart has the Kindle Fire on sale for the next couple weeks. It’s selling for the regular price, but it comes with  $50 gift card.

The KF is just over 2 months old, and it is already on sale. That would seem to suggest that sales aren’t quite as good as Amazon might hope. And I think this sale suggests that just the Kindle Fire is doing poorly, because Walmart isn’t offering  similar deal on anything else.

While this isn’t strictly a sale, it still comes to a very nice deal. It’s easy to spend $50 at Walmart; just buy another gadget. But if you do, please be careful about how you buy it. If you buy  product online and decide to return it, you will have a lot of trouble should you take it to a store.

Walmart

Last week Amazon gave us a glimpse into how many Kindles they’ve sold, but they didn’t get into the nitty gritty details on exactly how many of their new tablet, the Kindle Fire, they’ve sold.  Today an ad network has released traffic figures for November, and they definitely show the influence of the Kindle Fire.

Read more

If you were wondering about the success of the Kindle Fire, look no further.

On Tuesday The Wall Street Journal joined a growing group of publishers who are focused on the Kindle Fire. In addition to their iPad and Android apps, The WSJ now also offers an Android app that has been customized just for the Kindle Fire. The app is free, and can be downloaded to the Kindle Fire from the Amazon Appstore. Subscriptions start at $16 a month.

This move should come as no surprise. The Kindle Fire is predicted to compete with the iPad as the best selling tablet for this Christmas season. There are a couple estimates out now that suggest that the KF will sell between 4 and 5 million units this year. In comparison, the iPad and the iPad 2 each sold around a million units in their first months.

Last month, Amazon announced that the Kindle Format 8 (KF8), which includes support for HTML5, is replacing Mobi 7 for eBooks. This new format allows developers to do more for the Kindle Fire, but its not yet ready for everyone to use. In the meantime, Kindle Fire devices are already shipping, which is confusing some developers, who want their content Kindle Fire ready now.

In a thread on the Kindle Direct Publishing forum, developers have been discussing how to get their content ready for the Kindle Fire.

A poster named Alstair Phelan asked: “I have built 24 EOT fonts and formatted 1,500 pages of material for HTML5/CSS. I have also made book covers, interior graphics, front matter, and Tables of Content. How do I convert that material into KF8-compliant docs that the Kindle Fire can actually render?”

JTBigToad suggested: “You can’t load HTML directly to the KFIRE. Try Emailing a Double zipped HTML file to the (Your Kindle name )@kindle.com or the @Free.Kindle.com address then go to the Manage My Kindle page and in the personal doc section.”

NotJohn posted: “You cannot sell a book that works only on the Fire. All books are available to first, second, third, and fourth-generation e-ink Kindle owners, and if you sell them something that doesn’t work on their gadgets, they will be annoyed and will tell the world about their annoyance.”

The Kindle Fire shipped this week and reviewers around the web are sharing their thoughts on the new device. It’s been compared to the Nook Tablet, the BlackBerry Playbook and even the Samsung Galaxy Tab. The consensus, it’s pretty good for a $199 tablet, but it’s no iPad.

Engadget wrote: “So, the Kindle Fire is great value and perhaps the best, tightest integration of digital content acquisition into a mobile device that we’ve yet seen. Instead of having a standalone shopping app the entire tablet is a store — a 7-inch window sold at a cut-rate price through which users can look onto a sea of premium content. It isn’t a perfect experience, but if nothing else it’s a promising look into the future of retail commerce.”

The Wall Street Journal called it a “grown-up eReader with tablet spark.” Here is more from Walt Mossberg‘s review: “When compared to the iPad 2, I suspect the Fire will appeal to people on a budget and to those who envision using the iPad mainly to consume content, as opposed to those who see the larger tablet as a partial laptop replacement.”

The LA Times hasn’t posted their review yet, but the do have a nice unboxing video, which we have embedded above. Read more

The Kindle Fire is in the mail for those of you who are hoping to use the new device to read the news and magazines, we have put together a list of free news apps that can help you do so. Using Amazon’s App Store, you can load your Fire with many reading apps including these five:

1. Zinio: This free app lets you buy and read single issues of magazines or order subscriptions. Publications available include: Rolling Stone, The Economist, Hello!, US Weekly, T3 and Travel + Leisure. (Zinio is giving away $25 in credit to new users).

2. PressReader for Android: NewspaperDirect’s free app gives readers access to 2,000 full-content newspapers and magazines from 95 countries and in 51 languages. This includes: Al Jazirah, China Daily, Daily Mail, L’Equipe, The Hindu, The Guardian, The Globe and Mail, International Herald Tribune, Le Monde and National Post.

3. U.S. Newspapers: This free app gives users access many of the major American newspapers including: The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Financial Times and CNN.

4. Pulse News: This free app lets you customize your favorite news websites into one very clean and well-design dashboard.

5. Feedly: This free app aggregates content from blogs such as Endgadget, Mashable and TechCrunch.

CNN”s digital lifestyle’s correspondent Mario Strong spends a couple minutes covering the differences between the iPad and Amazon’s newest and greatest Kindle. I’ve watched the clip, and he does a pretty good job of explaining why Amazon made the hardware decisions that it did. If you were undecided about whether to get a Kindle Fire this clip should help you make up your mind.

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