Android made a jump today that signals the future of the platform. Anybody familiar with Android will take a look at its new Ice Cream Sandwich platform and know that Google has truly morphed its tablet version of the platform, Honeycomb, and the previous smartphone versions into an entirely new user interface. Whether or not users will respond favorably to it remains to be seen, but Android 4.0 is a dynamic update to the leading smartphone operating system.
What is new with Ice Cream Sandwich? Well, Google is playing to Android's strengths with ICS by creating new multi-tasking capabilities, resizable widgets, improved voice controls and quicker communication controls. Android has also tied its browser to the cloud, which will drastically improve how it renders and saves pages. Check out what is new with Android 4.0 below and how Android now stacks up against its competition.
When Amazon launched its Kindle Fire tablet last month, it sparked discussions among most tech enthusiasts and bloggers over things like whether or not they'd buy one and whether the new device should be seen as a competitor to Apple's tirelessly dominant iPad. One detail about what Amazon unveiled was cause for concern for some.
Silk, the Web browser that will ship with the new tablet, utilizes Amazon's powerful cloud computing infrastructure to help serve up Web pages faster and even predict your browsing habits. Naturally, this split architecture and its potential to capture private user data caught the attention of organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who inquired with Amazon about the privacy implications Silk presents.
Amazon has just announced the opening of the French Kindle Store, offering over 35,000 French-language e-books, all 28 L'Express bestsellers, hundreds of graphic novels and over 4,000 free classics. In all language, the store will offer French customers over 825,000 titles.
The first French-language Kindle is the non-touch model just released in the U.S., available for €99.00. It offers a 600x800, 6-inch screen with 1.25GB of internal storage. The release date is October 14.
It is interesting to look through all the material that Amazon has released for its announcement of the new Kindle Fire tablet. From the announcement of the new family of Kindles, to the product page on Amazon.com to the press release for the new cloud-based browser Silk, the word Android is not mentioned once.
The Kindle Fire is a tablet, built off Android. Amazon developers forked Android somewhere along the way, probably from either the Frozen Yogurt 2.2 or Gingerbread 2.3.4 so really, this is actually a tablet built off a smartphone OS and not the official Android tablet OS, Honeycomb. Yet, Amazon is about to blow the rest of the Android tablet ecosystem out of the water.
Alongside its Kindle Fire tablet device and new line of Kindle e-readers, Amazon introduced another new product today: Amazon Silk, a mobile Web browser that rethinks the way browsers have traditionally worked.
Silk essentially splits the architecture of the Web browser in half, relying on both the computing power of the hardware and on the remote servers that comprise Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). It relies on the cloud to call up certain elements of a page, acting sort of like a content delivery network built right into the browser. The company claims that this unique approach will offer a much faster browser experience to end users.
For the better part of the last year, rumors have been swirling around the possibility of Amazon launching its own tablet computer. For nearly as long, the device has been touted as a potential challenger to Apple's iPad, which remains overwhelmingly dominant in the space.
This morning, Amazon's tablet was finally unveiled. Should Apple be concerned?
In addition to the hotly anticipated Kindle Fire tablet, Amazon has announced a range of new e-ink Kindles. The first is a a full-screen, touch-controlled e-reader in the vein of its leading competitor, Barnes & Noble's latest Nook. It's called the Kindle Touch. The Wi-Fi only model is $99, and the 3G version is $149. A lighter full-screen Kindle without touch controls will sell for $79. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos says that it's "75% lighter than previous generations." These Kindles ship on November 21.
Amazon just announced the Kindle Fire. It's a Wi-Fi only, 7-inch tablet with a full-color, backlit, 1024x600 IPS touchscreen (video). It has a dual-core processor, and it weighs 14.6 ounces. It looks like a BlackBerry PlayBook. The resemblance is not an accident; as Ryan Block at gdgt reported on Monday, the same original design manufacturer (ODM) - Quanta Computer of Taiwan - made both, and Amazon's Kindle team used the PlayBook's hardware as a template.
But the similarities end there. The software is a custom fork of Android that has Amazon's own feel, and it puts Amazon's vast catalogues of digital content at users' fingertips. In addition to the Kindle reader app, it offers Amazon's Cloud Player for music, and Instant Video Player for TV and movies. It comes with a 30-day free trial of Amazon Prime, and it ships with Amazon's own Android Appstore, rather than Google's. With Android as the starting point, Amazon has built its own tablet experience on top of it. At $199, the Fire is now the top of the Kindle line. It ships November 15.
As e-books continue to grow in popularity, there's a seemingly unwinnable debate over which is better: digital books or their paper-based counterparts. Both have their advantages and it'll likely be quite awhile before paper books come close to disappearing. In addition all of the benefits that e-books bring, is it possible that they may also make it more difficult for books to be banned in the future?
Out of the American Library Association's top 10 most-banned books of last year, all but three of them are available for purchase from Amazon's Kindle Store, notes a blog post from Beyond Black Friday.
Amazon.com added FOX movie and TV titles through its Prime Membership platform today in a deal that will roughly double the number of available titles to 11,000 by this Fall.
The announcement comes two days before Amazon is expected to launch one of two Kindle tablets to compete with the iPad.
