Over the years, Steve wrote hundreds of mostly terse, often funny, irritable or persnickety emails to Apple customers who wrote him at steve@apple.com. Now a whole book of them is being published.
With the Kindle Fire, Amazon has proved that it is possible to compete with the iPad, at least in the budget tablet market. Will they try to take the crown from the iPhone’s head next with a so-called Kindle Phone? Yup, maybe!
After iOS 5 came and broke Stanza good and proper, it seemed almost certain that Amazon intended on killing off their world class e-reading app once and for all.
Thankfully, Amazon has taken pity on fans of the app with a long overdue update finally fixing Stanza under iOS 5, but with that reprieve comes a dose of bad news: according to Amazon, this will be the last Stanza update.
The Kindle Fire may be shaping up to be the first real device to challenge the iPad’s share of the tablet market but it’s not going to go unchallenged: book retailing giant Barnes & Noble have just announced the next generation of their own Android-based reading tablet, and unlike the Kindle Fire, its specs match and even exceed the iPad 2’s for half the price.
Cloud computing appears to be the future. But can every company afford their own version of Apple’s iCloud? Although Apple paid $1 billion in 2009 to acquire land for its North Carolina datacenter, that figure is only the ‘downpayment’ required for the tech giant to bring the cloud to millions of customers, according to a Friday report.
Rather than complying with Apple’s App Store terms and throwing the Cupertino company 30% of every sale it makes, Audible has launched an iPhone-friendly web app that allows users to add a bookmark to their home screen for quick and easy purchasing.
Amazon’s upcoming Kindle tablet may have cracked one of the toughest nuts facing companies hoping to compete with Apple’s lean, mean iPad supply machine: cost. The Internet retailer may rely heavily on the cloud to store ebooks, as well as stream music and video, weekend reports suggest.
Despite expectation Amazon’s tablet could challenge the iPad, analysts aren’t setting the bar too high for immediate sales. Indeed, the internet retailer will sell just 2 million of its 7-inch devices for the remainder of this year, one Wall Street expert suggests.
Amazon’s rumored tablet is very real, according to MG Siegler of TechCrunch. The ‘Amazon Kindle’ tablet runs a fully-customized version of the Android OS that “you’ve never seen before.” The device will sell for half the price of the entry-level iPad, and it’s expected to ship in November.
The latest class action lawsuit against Apple has been filed by law firm Hagens Berman and accuses Apple and five major publishers of conspiring to raise the price of ebooks.
Amazon’s not the only company to use the latest change in Apple’s in-app purchase policies forbidding links to outside e-stores as an excuse to cut the umbilical: Vudu has also shifted its streaming movie service over the web for iPad users.
Amazon’s Kindle application was recently at risk of being removed from the App Store because it contained a link to purchase content outside of Apple’s ecosystem — something Apple no longer allows developers to do under its latest App Store terms. In order to secure its place in the App Store, Amazon issued a last-minute update to its app to remove the link, but in a move that subtly tells Apple where to stick its new rules, Amazon has launched a web-based Kindle reader with support for the iPad. And it’s awesome!
If you love e-reading and the Kindle app for the iPad, you may have noticed the familiar “Kindle Store” button missing. Its absence is causing an uproar online and prompting questions whether Apple is unintentionally pushing consumers to buy iBook alternatives.
Amazon’s Kindle app for iOS was updated yesterday in order to comply with Apple’s latest in-app purchase terms and secure its place in the App Store. In addition to removing the link to its external Kindle store, however, did you notice that the update introduced more than 100 magazine and newspaper subscriptions to iOS?
Apple has just seemingly banned its first big name app for not playing along with Apple’s revised In-App Purchase rules, as Google’s official Google Books app, which contained a prominent web link to an outside e-store, has disappeared from the App Store. If it has happened to Google, will Amazon’s Kindle app be the next app to disappear?
Sources for the Wall Street Journal claim Amazon is getting set to launch its first tablet this October. The 9-inch device will go head-to-head against against Apple’s iPad, though it may not pack as many features.
Today’s June 30th. That’s an important day for app developers. It’s the day Apple expects app makers to comply with new guidelines saying you can no longer link directly to a way to buy in-app content out of app. Hulu Plus has already jumped through that hoop, but you know who hasn’t? Amazon with its Kindle app.
They say that no one but Apple can make a decent sub-$500 tablet, but Amazon not only thinks they can undercut the iPad in price once… they think they can do it with two tablet at once.
The iPad 2 already has phenomenal, 10-hour battery life, largely thanks to a combination of Apple’s custom-built, power-sipping A5 chip and the fact that inside, the iPad 2 is mostly battery.
Thanks to a new, cutting-edge tablet coating, though, your next iPad could run for twenty hours or more on a single charge, while providing Kindle-like outdoor readability.
‘Coyote’ and ‘Hollywood’ are the code-names of two tablets rumored to be a part of Amazon’s
upcoming tablet ‘family’. Details obtained from one tipster reveal the Coyote will boast a dual-core processor much like Apple’s iPad 2, whereas the Hollywood has something even more audacious up its sleeve: hardware that Amazon hopes will potentially make the iPad 3 obsolete even before it launches.
The company that helps build the Kindle reportedly is expanding their office in Cupertino, Calif. But Lab126 is unlikely to get a congratulatory fruit basket from their rival neighbor Apple.
Amazon is preparing a tablet of their own to compete with the iPad, and no lesser a higher-up than CEO Jeff Bezos has all but confirmed it.
Illustration student Rachel Walsh was assigned a seemingly impossible design task by her professor: explain the concept of the Amazon Kindle to Charles Dickens. Her solution is ingenious, and applies just as well to iBooks, but just imagine if she’d been asked to explain the iPad to Dickens instead.
Twitter mate of mine Giles Booth posted this on Flickr the other day, and it had me doing a double-take for a moment.
No, it isn’t actually running Newton OS. It’s displaying a picture. Just like this other image of a Kindle “running” Macintosh System 1.
You can put custom pictures on your Kindle if you like – try using these instructions. See what other classic Apple software you can “run” on your Kindle. Clarisworks? Eudora? Hypercard? Ahh, memories…
(Photo by Giles Booth, re-published with permission)
Although Amazon’s Kindle platform seemed to stumble a bit in the wake of the iPad’s debut, mostly from surprise, they’ve since rallied and continued to increase their lead as the biggest e-bookstore on Earth. In fact, according to Amazon’s own metrics, they now sell more Kindle e-books than they do paperbacks.
How’d Amazon compete with iBooks? Ubiquity: Kindle software is available on almost every modern OS out there, and a Kindle book purchased on one can be read on another. Amazon managed to achieve this feat by cutting middlemen out of the transaction entirely: if you purchase a book in-app, you simply are directed to an Amazon webpage. It’s all done on the Internet.
If a new report coming from The New York Times is anything to go by, though, Apple may be ready to strike Kindle on iOS down for the count unless it agrees to utilize iTunes’ own in-app purchase system, though.
