Would Jeff Bezos share Amazon's exclusive grip on the Kindle Fire?
Amazon sold millions of Kindles this holiday season, led by the company's first-ever tablet, the Kindle Fire, leaving some analysts wondering if other Android tablets might soon be flavored with Amazon's secret sauce.
After a full year of dozens of Android tablets from numerous manufacturers, none--excepting the discontinued and momentarily deeply discounted HP TouchPad--made more than the slightest dent in the iPad's dominance in the slate market. None, that is, until Amazon introduced its clunky but inexpensive loss leader--available for just $199 and pre-registered to your Amazon account so you can begin consuming the company's universe of content right away.
Despite the massive gulf between the iPad and Kindle Fire when it comes to price and specs, the two successful tablets do have one important characteristic in common--easy, built-in access to all kinds of content to consume on the device via the iTunes and Amazon stores, respectively.
"Devices need to lead with content services or they're dead in the water," Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps told me. "By next summer we'll have had several months of Amazon demonstrating that a successful consumer electronics product strategy has to lead with content services."
Richard Windsor, global technology specialist for Nomura Securities, went one step further. He sees some of the current Android tablet makers looking to Amazon to help float some of their future offerings, or perhaps going as far as taking over production of the follow-up to the Kindle Fire.
"I'm not convinced Amazon's going to stay in the hardware business very long. Look at their business model--they are selling this thing at cost in order to make money on content. So if you can get someone else to make the tablet for you and sell it with your user experience on it, what do you care?"
Windsor suspects Amazon's first $199 tablet could be a way to "seed the market." He sees makers of competing Android tablets--which consumers seem to view as overpriced and lacking access to compelling content--in a position to start courting Amazon for possible partnerships.
"What you could get is a range of form factors and sizes to suit different pockets without Amazon having to make them all. You might see an "HTC Dream Kindle" or the "Kindle Fire HTC" or "Kindle Fire 2 10-inch by HTC."
Amazon is famously mum on its future plans. Despite months of speculation, the company refused to acknowledge that it was working on a tablet until it was unveiled by CEO Jeff Bezos this fall.
For its part, Google has been working feverishly of late to make more content available via the Android Market. In the past year books, movies and most recently music have all been introduced for purchase and consumption on mobile devices running the OS, an increasing number of which will soon be getting the much improved Ice Cream Sandwich version of Android.
Despite Google's best efforts, however, no tablet with native access to the Android Market has taken off with consumers. Hot sellers like the Kindle Fire and the Barnes and Noble Nook do their best to push users in the direction of their own content. We'll soon see if other tablet makers opt to follow their lead as well.
|
Next year, Apple will unveil its iPad 3. Only an event of apocalyptic proportions would prevent the tablet’s release. History tells us we can expect iPad 3 sometime in the first quarter — but exactly when? And will it include a retina display? And will there be two different models?
If you enjoy your New Year’s Eve cocktails with an extra shot of speculation, check out our iPad 3 rumor and report roundup below. We didn’t originate these stories, folks. We’re just bundling them up in one tidy little package for your own scrutiny and reality-checking. （Read More ： iPad 3 launch rumored for Steve Jobs’ Feb 24 birthday）
The Hardware: What Are the Rumored Specs?
The iPad 3 could be 4G and use Qualcomm’s LTE Gobi 4000 chip, according to CNET. Apple uses Qualcomm to supply the 3G chips in its iPhones. Digitimes says the new tablet is also expected to use a quad-core A6 processor, an upgrade from the A5 in the iPad 2 and iPhone 4S.
A “retina display”-level screen is expected to finally arrive on the iPad with Apple’s next launch. The 9.7-inch display is expected to boast a 2048×1536 resolution, according to DisplaySearch analyst Richard Shim.
The display is also expected to utilize a different kind of technology than past iPads: indium gallium zinc oxide (IGZO) — this in order to increase resolution to full HD. Jefferies analyst Peter Mizek suggested Apple would be using a modified version of IGZO, as this technology would allow the device to be thinner since it wouldn’t need dual-bar LED backlighting.
iLounge, on the other hand, expects the iPad 3 to be “modestly thicker” (0.7 mm) than its predecessor.
The Wall Street Journal reported in November that Sharp would be making the displays for Apple’s next-generation iPad (and that Sharp already supplies displays for iPhones). Digitimes says that both Sharp and Samsung will be producing the high-resolution displays, whose dimensions are the same as the iPad 2’s.
iPad 3 could have up to a 14,000 mAh battery, says Digitimes.
ETA: When Will It Be Announced — and Delivered for Sale?
A November 18 Digitimes report suggested iPad 3 units will start being assembled at Foxconn in January.
As of December 12, though, Digitimes was reporting Apple’s next iPad could land in March or April. Components are, reportedly, already being delivered to the factory, pegging the launch at three to four months away, Digitimes wrote. Seeing as the last iPad made its debut in early March, this does seem reasonable.
Although it wouldn’t be available for the masses until spring, we could get a glimpse at the iPad 3 as soon as January, according to iLounge and Digitimes. Loop Insight’s Jim Dalrymple said that rumor is “completely false,” though. We won’t be seeing the next iPad at MacWorld in January (or CES, for that matter), according to his contacts.
Iterations: Will There Be More Than One iPad 3?
Apple has been toying with a 7.85-inch display panel, according to a November Digitimes report, fueling rumors that we could be seeing an iPad “mini” debut alongside a full-sized iPad.
Nope, never mind, Digitimes retracted all that iPad Mini stuff, but still expects two new iPads will be announced. Both will feature QXGA resolution (again, that’s 2,048×1,536), but one version will be high-end and the other will be targeted at the mid-range market. The existing iPad 2 would battle in the low-end market against the popular Amazon Kindle Fire tablet. The higher-end model will feature an 8-megapixel camera, while the middle-range model would sport a 5-megapixel camera.
Based on the number of contradictory reports floating around, and the accuracy of iPhone and iPad rumors in the past, one thing is pretty clear: Nobody really knows what to expect of Apple’s next big iDevice until it actually launches.
But the iPad 3 is coming, and it’s sure to steal the hearts of Apple fanboys, and stoke the fury of Apple critics.
Another year of AOSP
Well, the work year is over for me as today was my last day in the office before the new year.
This closes my 3rd whole year working on the Android Open-Source Project (my involvement in 2008 had been quite minor). It's been an interesting year for AOSP, full of contrasts.
On the positive side:
-I finally managed to distribute some proprietary hardware-related binaries for the very first time. This is an issue that I had been working on since before the G1 even shipped, and it finally became reality. For me personally, that's really a huge deal, because it really makes it practical to take the AOSP code, modify it, install it on a phone in a way that actually works, and to distribute the resulting image. This enables community builds of AOSP in ways that were not possible before, thanks to a license that allows redistribution.
-I also finally managed to distribute some factory images for the very first time. Just like for the proprietary binaries, this is the result of 3 years of work. The main benefit is obvious: play with an AOSP build for while, and then get your device back to its factory state, over and over and over. It also has some other nice advantages, e.g. it allows AOSP users to stay up-to-date with the latest bootloader and baseband firmware.
-For the first time, AOSP supports a non-Nexus non-ADP device, which also happens to be a tablet (Xoom), and supports a development board (PandaBoard). We also added support for Intel CPUs, including emulator support. Those show well that AOSP is important for companies other than Google.
-We also got some proprietary binaries submitted directly in AOSP instead of being separate downloads, e.g. the touchscreen firmware for Galaxy Nexus and the Wifi/Bluetooth firmware for PandaBoard.
-We reached the point where AOSP is running on 11 different targets (8 different devices from 4 different families, plus 3 virtualized or emulated systems).
-IceCreamSandwich was a massive release, which added over 220,000 changes over Gingerbread. As usual since Froyo, the full source history is available, so that people can easily study how the code evolved, or research when, why and by whom a given line of code was written.
-With IceCreamSandwich, we now have a fully Open-Source NFC stack and a fully Open-Source sensor processing chain. In Galaxy Nexus, we also have a wifi/bluetooth chip that can work without requiring any proprietary firmware.
-I tagged 26 device releases in 2011, compared to 12 releases in 2010.
-I fine-tuned the process that we use when releasing GPL source files, so that it's now much easier to build the GPL source code independently from full platform releases.
-We Open-Sourced the source.android.com site itself, thanks to the work on the intern who took care of that in the beginning of the year.
-Last but not least, the AOSP team grew, and that allows us to split the workload: +Conley Owens takes care of the long-term engineering while I manage the day-to-day execution. Conley gets credit for implementing the auto-verifier that we had running on Gerrit for a while, for dealing with many build issues that appear on various environments, and also for a lot of other work that's not visible yet but that'll make things even better in the future. All that happens under the watchful eye of +Dan Morrill who occasionally stops by to say hi, and with a lot of help from Google's main Open-Source team.
On the negative side:
-Not releasing the Honeycomb source code was catastrophic for the AOSP community. I had never before received so many angry emails, so many threats, to the point where I had to take several weeks off at some point to get away from it. Even today, there's a lot of bitterness left on all sides. From start to finish, Honeycomb probably cost AOSP anywhere from 6 to 12 months.
-We had 7 weeks of downtime on our Git hosting, and 4 months (and counting) on Gerrit. The Git outage was manageable as it happened at a time of low activity, but it still consumed a lot of engineering effort. However, the Gerrit outage couldn't have come at a worse time: not having Gerrit right as IceCreamSandwich was getting released means that we lost a precious opportunity to merge in many external contributions at a point where AOSP and Google's internal master branch were very close, the closest in about 2 years. No conspiracy here, just some really bad luck.
-In spite of a lot of progress, there are still far too many proprietary binaries and factory images that I'm not allowed to distribute, and I'm still wasting far too much time trying to convince those many companies that they should be helping AOSP run on their hardware (well, I've given up on HTC, Motorola and Qualcomm, as it's clear at this point that they're not going to help in that area).
Overall, in spite of a few serious difficulties, it's been another good year for AOSP.
Summary: While everyone gets excited about public APIs such as Facebook and Twitter, an even bigger revolution has been quietly underway: enterprises of all sizes are API-enabling their back-end systems.
2012 will see an emergence of application programming interfaces (APIs) originating from everyday enterprises. That’s the view of Anant Jhingran, who says that enterprise APIs becoming mainstream at a rapid clip.
In fact, the excitement around public APIs such as Facebook and Twitter “hides the real revolution,” he says. That revolution is the fact that “enterprises of all sizes are API-enabling their back-end systems. This opens up the aperture of the use of back-end systems, not just through apps built by the enterprise, but also through apps built by partners and independent developers.”
I couldn’t agree more. We’re seeing more non-IT companies becoming cloud providers. The lines continue to blur between service/application providers and consumers to the point where everyone is both.
Even the largest and most IT-rich companies — such as telecoms — are looking to the outside world to build apps that will bring more value to their offerings, Jhingran observes.
This is a departure from service oriented architecture as we’ve know it, he adds. “Service-oriented architectures (SOA) are for app-to-app integration,” he says. While SOAs use back-end systems through internal APIs, “the new API world focuses on integration with apps and developers, not with people or processes via SOA.” Part of this transition is to “think outside-in as opposed to inside-out,” by providing APIs to encourage outside innovation.
Of course, Jhingran cautions, traffic coming in from the outside will mean more unpredictable demand and rapidly changing usage patterns, as opposed to the more predictable patterns in the enterprise software environment. Delivering the API layer through cloud will help prevent suddenly bringing back-end production systems to their knees.
Google is experimenting with its Google Adwords offerings, attempting to go beyond regular text ads with Google Email Subscription Ads, allowing companies to buy ads that automatically fill in a “Subscribe to newsletter (or whatever, I’m assuming)” slot with a given searcher’s Google email address during a search.
Emailblog pointed out earlier this month that the ads were running with automaker Honda (ads which I still can’t see), and it seems like those offerings have expanded to results for email marketing services AWeber and Constant Contact (ads which I can see). Clicking on the “Privacy” button next to the subscription button lets you know that your email will be sent to the advertiser — In case that wasn’t clear(?).
When asked to explain what exactly was going on, a Google representative gave me the following statement (which is basically a more official sounding version I just said):
“We’re currently running a small experiment of a new ad format that helps users sign up more easily for email subscriptions or other free newsletters. This new ad format contains a box within the ad that displays a user’s Google email address (if logged in). If a user chooses to click ‘Subscribe to newsletter’ then the email address is sent to the advertiser directly, which is clearly disclosed within the ad itself.”
Something tells me TONS of email marketing companies will be using this once it’s actually official. My requests about whether or not (and when, if so) this will become a permanent feature have as of yet gone unanswered by Google.
|
|
