Still steaming over Netflix's recent shenanigans and couldn't care less that it's going to be available on the Kindle Fire you pre-ordered? Well hey, you have options, and Amazon just sent us word that Hulu Plus is joining its selection of several thousands of apps that will be available on the Kindle Fire next week, provided you're down with the $8/month subscription.
If Amazon's Kindle Fire fails to shake up the tablet market and pose a real threat to Apple's iPad, it won't be for lack of interest. Only a lack of execution can stop the Kindle Fire from being considered a huge success, because at this point, Amazon is on pace to move a lot of units by the end of the year, and the Kindle Fire isn't even available yet.
Everyone who pre-ordered a Kindle Fire tablet can exhale, a Netflix app will be available at launch. And so will Facebook, Pandora, Rhapsody, and several others, Amazon confirmed today. We tend to take popular apps for granted, but when Amazon failed to specifically mention Netflix, and then Barnes & Noble announced its Nook Tablet with Netflix support, some people who pre-ordered a Kindle Fire began to panic. Turns out Amazon was just waiting for the right moment.
According to Engadget, Barnes and Noble will indeed be announcing a Nook Color successor at its event on November 16th. The leaked documents obtained by Engadget refer to the device as the Nook Tablet, but that could be a placeholder. The specs of the Nook Tablet are strikingly similar to those of the soon to be released Kindle Fire, but just a bit better in some ways. The new Tablet is expected to look very similar to the original Nook Color, and is expected to sell for $250 at launch.
We like it when Amazon and Barnes & Noble go to war with each other. We like it because when the two sides try to undercut and one-up each other, the consumer wins every time. These two are responsible for sparking an eBook reader price war that brought significant savings to the eReader market in a short period of time, and it looks as though the two sides are getting ready to force the other's hand once more.
Amazon has made small tweaks to its Kindle e-book format over the years, but now the retailer has surprised the industry again by announcing a new HTML5 version of the Kindle format called Format 8. This approach leverages a toolset that already has wide support and allows a richer experience -- perfect for magazines and comics.
Amazon did more than just throw down the gauntlet when it announced its $200 Kindle Fire tablet, the e-tailer may have also scared off some of the competition altogether. Oddly enough, the Kindle Fire might actually help Microsoft increase its presence in the mobile market, as OEMs look to Windows 8-based slates in order to avoid a price war among Android tablets.
The idea of Amazon’s Silk browser, for the Kindle Fire is an intriguing one. By caching web assets ahead of time, Amazon hopes to accelerate the browsing experience. But running all user traffic through Amazon’s EC2 cloud has made some privacy-minded people a little uneasy. Now members of Congress are starting to ask questions, and some of them are not totally ridiculous.
Just how big could the $200 Kindle Fire be when it launches next month? Pretty friggin’ big. Not “Bigger than the iPad” big – at least not yet – but some sales forecasts and thought-provoking, yet unofficial calculations by an Android developer show that the Fire and its custom Android 2.3 interface could own a bigger slice of the market pie than all Android Honeycomb tablets combined before the end of the year.
The Kindle Fire isn’t even due to ship to consumers for another month, but already it has attracted its first patent suit. Smartphone Technologies LLC, which as far as we can tell doesn’t actually make anything, has sued Amazon for infringing on four of its patents. These patents seem to describe operating a touchscreen device by tapping on icons; apparently that’s a real patent. 
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