The Evolution of Technology

Posts Tagged ‘Amazon’

Remember that image? It came from an article about a month ago regarding the market for Android tablets. As the image shows, people are more apt to buy a tablet PC from Amazon than any other Apple competitor. That’s convenient, because Amazon is planning at least two tablets for this year. What else is convenient: they’re apparently listening to what consumers actually want. As part of the same survey, 80 percent of customers said that they would buy an Android tablet over the iPad if the Android tablet were less than $ 250. According to a report in the New York Post, Amazon plans to sell its tablet for “hundreds less than the entry-point $ 499 iPad.” That could then put the price point at around $ 200, which, if consumers are being truthful, would sway many of them away from the altar of Apple. This could absolutely change the tablet landscape, just in time for a holiday season that will likely see many tablets exchanged as gifts.

Via Phandroid.

This post originated at AndGeeks.com – home to all things Android! Also a great source of info about Android Phones.

Amazon going for the tablet PC jugular

If you want to get paid for your apps, don’t give them away for free. There’s nothing remotely controversial about that statement, yet it’s the overriding theme in the most recent developer outcry regarding the Amazon App Store.

To ensure everyone’s on the same page: Amazon recently opened its own Android app store, which puts more of a focus on paid applications rather than free ones. Since the Android Market is already pre-installed on new Android handsets, Amazon has had to promote the store heavily. One way it has done this is with a free app of the day, in which they give away a normally premium app for 24 hours. That’s a great deal for them, but developers should know by now that it’s not all that hot for them.

In fact, Shift Jelly, the outraged developer, knew of this. As they detail in the above-linked blog post, they initially declined Amazon’s offer to become the free app of the day. They knew that their business model revolved around selling the app, and so giving it away probably wasn’t the best idea. But Amazon came back with the typical product placement arguments, claiming that exposure from being the free app of the day, combined with 14 subsequent days of main page placement, would increase sales overall.

While we don’t know much about it, we do know that Amazon will release a tablet later this year. We can assume at this point that it will run Android. Amazon has run some trick plays in the past, but I doubt they’ll go so far as to create their own mobile OS, especially since they recently released their own Android app store. There is huge potential here for Amazon to one-up the market and have the device this holiday season. With a few lucky breaks it might even generate iPad-like hype. This all has me wondering what the Amazon tablet will look like. What will it bring to the table that other tablets do not?

Today, both Rob Jackson of Phandroid and Kevin Tofel of GigaOm brought up some ideas. They’re quite different, but both are tantalizing. If Amazon somehow incorporated both, they would certainly move to the front of the Amazon tablet market. The question, of course, is of how practically feasible they are. We’ve seen many great ideas that have been poorly executed. While I love the idea of an e-ink display and cloud music storage, Amazon has to find a way to make it work for everyone.

You might remember the saga from earlier this month. Three weeks ago we found that if you make a few changes to your rooted Android, you could sync your music with the cloud. A few days later I chronicled my experienced with the Honeycomb cloud music player. I know some people have found success with it, but for me it was an utter failure. It’ll come eventually, so I’m not too upset. Making me less upset is Amazon’s recent announcement of its own cloud storage and streaming service. They’ve made it quite easy, and I’m jumping on board as I type.

I caught this on Engadget, but all the information is in the press release that Amazon circulated. Here are the important numbers. Everyone gets 5GB of free storage, but there are plenty of plans beyond that. The best way to increase your storage is to buy an MP3 album from Amazon.com. That gets you 20GB of storage for a year, which normally costs $ 20. Additionally, music purchased from the Amazon store doesn’t count against your quota. This is quite brilliant, as it incentivizes people to purchase from Amazon. It also disincentivizes people to buy DRM music from the iTunes store, since that can’t be uploaded to the cloud.