Amazon is reportedly ready to take on the likes of the Apple TV and Roku with a set-top box of its own, presumably some sort of Kindle Box.
Amazon Will Go Head-To-Head Against Apple TV With New Kindle Box [Report]
![Amazon Will Go Head-To-Head Against Apple TV With New Kindle Box [Report] 0424-amazon-630x420](https://www.cultofmac.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/0424-amazon-630x420.jpg)
Amazon is reportedly ready to take on the likes of the Apple TV and Roku with a set-top box of its own, presumably some sort of Kindle Box.
Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablets have been some of the best competition to the iPad, mostly because they’re cheap but come with good software. It seems like Amazon would sell the Kindle for as cheap as possible if it meant taking a slice of Apple’s pie.
Earlier this morning, a rumor was floated by TechCrunch that Amazon is making a $99 tablet to compete with the iPad mini. It sounded crazy at the time because the Kindle Fire is already $130 cheaper than the iPad mini. Turns out that the rumor was too good to be true and Amazon’s already shot it down.
Amazon hasn’t been able to beat the iPad in terms of features, apps or build quality, but the ace up the online retail giant’s sleeve was always the price: at just $199 for the 7-inch Kindle Fire HD, getting Amazon’s tablet is at least $130 cheaper than Apple’s cheapest iPad mini.
Undercutting Apple on price, then, is the major way Amazon is competing ith Apple in the tablet space, and a new report suggests they are about to take that even further with the release of a $99 Kindle Fire.
Even though Apple had a head start on tablets with the iPad, the number of Android tablets in use is expected to pass the iPad later this year.
According to a new report from IDC, the iPad’s marketshare will decrease in 2013 from 51%, down to 46%, while Android grows its marketshare to 49%.
After updating the Gmail app for iOS, Google has decided to bring many of the redesigned UI improvements over to its web and offline apps.
The Gmail web app for Android, iOS, Blackberry, and Kindle Fire was updated today with a redesigned UI to make it look more like the iOS app, after many Gmail users requested Google make the change.
Rovio has taken some time away from Angry Birds and Bad Piggies to focus on its next project, the official game for the upcoming DreamWorks movie The Croods. Believe it or not, it’s not a physics-based puzzle game, and Rovio has released the game’s first trailer to prove it.
Teardown specialists iFixit have published a new tablet repairability guide that quickly tells you how difficult it’s going to be to mend your broken Android, iOS, or Windows 8 slate. The guide features 18 popular tablets, which have been given a repairability score between one and ten. The higher the score, the easier they are to repair.
Unsurprisingly, Apple’s iPads are some of the hardest tablets to fix, second only to the Microsoft Surface Pro — the only tablet with a score of one. Amazon’s Kindle Fire’s, on the other hand, are relatively easy to repair, as are Dell’s devices.
Even though Android has been dominating the smartphone marketshare, the tablet wars are a completely different story as the iPad is clearly the most popular device while all Android tablets are struggling to gain significant usage.
In a new report from the Chitika Ad Network, Apple’s iPad now accounts for 81% of U.S. tablet web traffic. The iPad is so far ahead of the Android tablets, that even if you combined the top 3 performing Android tablets marketshare, they still would look insignificant next to the iPad’s numbers.
Thanks to affordable offerings like the Amazon Kindle Fire HD and the Google Nexus 7, Android tablets continue to increase their market share and claw away at the iPad’s lead. However, Apple’s tablet remains king of the web, accounting for a whopping 87% of tablet web traffic in North America.
The iPad mini is Apple’s answer to smaller Android tablets from the likes of Amazon and Google. But there’s a good reason why it doesn’t come with the same $200 price tag. A teardown has revealed that the new iOS device costs at least $188 to build, and that price rises when you add bigger storage options and 4G connectivity.