Hasta La Gadget!

“Today, we’re going to show you the third leg of our device business strategy,” Jeff Bezos begins. His audience is modest: four people sitting around a table in an Amazon conference room. It’s a far cry from the Santa Monica airplane hangar his company rented out for last year’s event. Bezos picks up a dry erase marker and begins breaking down the first two parts, elements the company has focused on since it first began building Kindles. “One,” he says, narrating the words as he goes along, like an enthusiastic high school teacher, “premium products at non-premium prices. Two: make money when people use our devices, not when they buy our devices.”

“We sell our hardware and roughly break even and then when they use the devices and buy content,” he adds. “Our point of view is that this is more aligned with the customer. We don’t have to get discouraged when we see people using fourth-generation Kindles. Bezos draws a Venn diagram to illustrate the third part of the puzzle. He writes “customer delight” on one side and “deep integration throughout the entire stack” on the other. The intersection houses the “hardest” and “coolest things,” which utilize OS, key apps, the hardware stack and the cloud. “It’s a little abstract,” he adds, “but I think it will be extremely clear when I show it to you.” The template for the third piece of the puzzle is the new Kindle Fire HDX series — the company’s latest premium tablets.%Gallery-slideshow90904% %Gallery-slideshow90903%

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Source: Amazon (1), (2)

Here it is: Microsoft’s powerhouse Surface Pro 2. As we’ve seen and heard already, Microsoft’s follow-up to the Surface Pro is thinner and considerably faster. We got our hands on a 256GB model to form some initial impressions and begin to determine whether this guy is worth the $899-and-up going rate, a $100 jump from the original Pro’s pricing scheme. Head past the break to dive in.

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Not content with flogging other companies’ tablets, today UK supermarket chain Tesco is launching one of its own. Priced at £119 and available from September 30th, the Hudl features a 7-inch (1,440 x 900 resolution) display for watching those Blinkbox titles in 720p, a quad-core Rokchip 1.5GHz processor, stock Android 4.2.2, a microSD slot for supplementing the 16GB of internal storage and, according to Tesco, a battery that’ll last around 9 hours on a full charge. Some of the specs, such as dual WiFi antennae and stereo speakers on the rear face seem carefully designed to square up against Amazon’s elderly (and soon-to-be-replaced) Kindle Fire HD, which, at £160, may suddenly look expensive beside the Hudl. Amazon, however, can claim the stronger ecosystem, while Google’s £199 Nexus 7 boasts better all-round hardware.

The device is slightly chubby and plasticky, as you’d expect, but it’s not some rebadge. Tesco says it worked directly with a manufacturer (Archos, as it turns out) to produce a tablet of its own design. Also, to the retailer’s credit, the tablet feels sturdy, which seems to be a theme of certain optional Hudl-branded accessories, too. These include a pair of headphones and a rubbery case intended to make the slate more child-friendly. Tesco says it’ll double the value of ClubCard vouchers put towards a Hudl purcahse, meaning customers can pick one up for free if they have enough points for a £60 voucher. There’s also an offer coming for Blinkbox vouchers, designed to tempt you into Tesco’s content ecosystem that complements its first foray into hardware — we hear the promotion starts next week and vouchers will be half-price, so you’ll be able to get £20 of streaming content for a tenner.

Sharif Sakr saved up all of his ClubCard points for this report.

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If you’re of a certain age, you think of You Don’t Know Jack as a relic from the ’90s. But to its credit, the trivia game has made an impressively smooth transition to the twenty-first century: Jackbox Games already has apps for iOS, Android, Facebook and even OUYA. Until now, though, gameplay’s been about as asynchronous as a game of Words With Friends: you took your turn and waited for your friend (wherever they were) to take theirs. Today, the company launched You Don’t Know Jack Party, an iOS version of the game that’s specifically meant to be played by a bunch of people hanging out in the same place. Using AirPlay, you guys can stream it to an Apple TV and use your device as a remote, or you can play on an iPhone / iPad and use your phones as controllers instead.

The nice thing, obviously, is that multiple devices are supported (up to four players, to be precise). Also, your friends with Android phones can still use their handsets as controllers, so they won’t be left calling out answers on the sidelines. In addition, Jackbox says it would like to port the game over to other platforms, including Android and maybe even Chromecast. For now, though, it’s an iOS-only affair. The app itself is free, and you get one gratis episode, but after that you’re looking at regular in-app purchases ($2.99 for five episodes or $9.99 for a pack of 30). Luckily for you, our demo video below don’t cost a thing.

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When HP announced its first Android tablet, the Slate 7, we were surprised (and a little disappointed) to see the company attacking the low end of the market. Where were the high-end tablets, we wondered? What about some big-screened models? Or medium-sized ones? Turns out, HP was saving them all for the holiday shopping season. The company just announced four Android tablets, ranging in size from 7 to 10 inches. Two have Tegra 4, two can be had with 4G, and one has a stylus in the box. On top of all that, HP also introduced two more Windows tablets, including a 10-inch slate and an 11-incher with a keyboard dock. All will go on sale in November, though with the exception of one model HP isn’t revealing pricing yet. For now, though, best if you study up on the specs: there’s quite a bit to unpack here.

Filed under: Tablets, HP

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