Om Malik argues that Bezos is the inheritor to Steve Jobs’s crown. I agree. Not because Bezos has copied anything Jobs did, but because he has not. What he’s done that is Jobs-like is doggedly pursue, year after year, iteration after iteration, a vision unlike that of any other company — all in the name of making customers happy.Daring Fireball blogger John Gruber • Offering his take on Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD, which does something interesting — it undercuts Apple’s prices by hundreds of dollars and offers an approach that’s unique in that it’s so doggedly focused on content consumption as its main driver. “Apple’s goal is to sell as many iPads as it can,” he says. “Amazon’s goal is to sell as many Kindle Fires as it can to a specific audience: active Amazon.com customers.” But then again, a series of reviews out tonight seem to suggest that the Fire HD is good, but not perfect. Then there are those ready to take out the daggers. Still though, watching the press conference from last week, you get the feeling that Jeff Bezos is onto something. Think Bezos lives up to Gruber’s billing above?
When Sony comes up with a tablet, they go in big. How big? Well, this 20-inch monstrosity, which looks like a giant iPad, runs Windows 8 and weighs roughly 11 and a half pounds. (To put this in perspective: The iPad, which has a screen a little under half this size, weighs 1.5 pounds.) Guess you won’t be putting this in your murse.
Samsung Electronics defeated Apple in the latest spat in the rivals’ patent wars when a British judge ruled Samsung’s Galaxy tablets did not infringe the U.S. company’s designs for the iPad because they were “not as cool.”
In Monday’s High Court judgment Judge Colin Birss said that Samsung’s Galaxy tablets belonged to the same family as the Apple design when viewed from the front, but the Samsung products were “very thin, almost insubstantial members of that family with unusual details on the back.”
“They do not have the same understated and extreme simplicity which is possessed by the Apple design. They are not as cool,” he said. “The overall impression produced is different.”
READ MORE: Samsung wins court case against Apple because it’s “not as cool”
Defeat disguised as victory.
Introducing the Nexus 7: Built in conjunction with highly-regarded hardware manufacturer ASUS, the 7-inch tablet will feature a front-facing camera, 1280x800 display, Nvidia Tegra3 processor, Android 4.1 — commonly known as Jelly Bean — and a price tag of $199. Jelly Bean also received a bit of attention, and a new demonstration, during the announcement event in San Francisco this morning. (Photo via CNET) source
In case you were wondering, Microsoft hasn’t given up on the original Surface product — which is a giant iPad-like table they released back in 2007. They’ve just renamed it to PixelSense, which makes less sense, but at least they didn’t kill the product entirely. Surface is a good name, but does it really work better for their new tablet than this?
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So, how does the news industry think you read the news? That’s a question it tries to answer answer each year, when the Pew Research Center releases its yearly “State of the News Media” report, which has long been seen as a bit of a bellwether as far as where trends are going. You can read the full report over this-a-way, but we wanted to pull out a few highlights, below:
(Photo by NS Newsflash)
» Why is the PlayBook flopping? If you asked RIM, you’d get an answer that sounds pretty jargon-y: “Recent shifts in the competitive dynamics of the tablet market and a delay in the release of the PlayBook OS 2.0 software.” Here’s the English version of that answer: “The iPad, the Nook Tablet and the Kindle Fire.” But that’s just us talking. Meanwhile, RIM has been trimming the price of the PlayBook from an absurd $500 to as low as $199 — in part to clear inventory for the next version of the device, though we’re guessing the fact that other seven-inch tablets are selling for roughly that price doesn’t help.
But seriously … I am not kidding.
I’m not watching all of...
Yahoo wants to buy Hulu now too. They’re going on an “I...
I’m moving back to New York in a few days. Unlike past...
OMG. I got so...
In this week’s Newsweek, a little...
Tumblr this morning. [h/t anne]
#@#$%!.tumblr.com
Heavily-discounted BlackBerry Playbook disappears from online listings, orders cancelled: Sounds like RIM didn’t learn a lesson from the whole HP Touchpad debacle.
The one thing the iPad was missing, finally accounted for: This Kickstarter project, Touchfire, promises tactile keyboard functionality. And wow, does it deliver. The cost is perhaps a little high — $45 for a pre-order — but for people who wish they had a keyboard on the iPad, this might actually be your dream piece of latex.
» Loss leader vs. straight-up leader: Amazon knows that the thing that was going to get the Kindle Fire to sell was the price, and it appears that even though the device is going to sell at a $10 loss per unit, they’ll make that back quickly through the sale of music and other stuff. This is a situation unlike that of Apple, which sells its devices at a profit and makes money through the sale of content. But that said, Jeff Bezos is looking particularly Jobsian these days.
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