Last week’s Facebook announcement was not much of a surprise. Everyone knew Zuck & Co. were out to invade Android, offering big, blue and white thumbs to stamp on every aspect of a user’s mobile experience. Sure, Chatheads are neat, …
For the sake of this story, let’s pretend The Hunger Games is a TV show. M’Kay?
Amazon may not be building a $99 Kindle Fire, but it is rolling out its X-Ray for Movies feature it introduced six months ago on its Kindle Fire HD to now be able to offer the same service to its library of television shows.
The X-Ray for TV will allow Kindle Fire users to be able to access IMDb while they’re watching a TV show, giving them immediate access to everything the database has to offer to give them the information they might be looking for on that particular show or episode. The update will be available for “the most popular TV shows on Amazon,” which in layman’s terms means not every TV show will use Amazon’s X-Ray for TV. (more…)
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Amazon X-ray—the Kindle Fire feature that knows everything piece of information about a movie you’re watching while you watch it—is expanding to TV shows. More »
Amazon just announced that it is adding its X-Ray feature to TV shows. The feature already worked with movies thanks to data from IMDb, but the company will now use this very same data for other video content. The entire Kindle Fire family will receive the feature and the Amazon Instant Video app on Wii U will get is as well.
As a reminder, X-Ray allows you to discover more about the content you are reading or watching. It first appeared with books — it shows you the different characters, where they appear in the book and how they are related to the story. Then Amazon added X-Ray to movies back in September 2012. In that case, watchers can instantly know the name of an actor in a scene. IMDb is owned by Amazon, allowing the Kindle team to tap into a very comprehensive movie database. As IMDb provides data for TV shows as well, adding TV shows to X-Ray was just a matter of time.
The idea is to make the video experience unique on Amazon’s devices, making people want to buy those tablets or download those Amazon apps and stay in the Amazon ecosystem. It’s been known that Amazon doesn’t make much profit from selling hardware. Instead, it wants people to use the Kindle Fire tablets to buy content.
Of course, the X-Ray feature only works with videos you buy or rent from Amazon Instant Video or videos from the Amazon Prime collection. X-Ray could be one of those little features that make you choose to watch a movie or TV show on Amazon over Netflix or iTunes.
In addition to providing the X-Ray feature to Kindle Fire users, the feature will make its way to Amazon Instant Video’s Wii U app. This fact shows that what matters for Amazon is that people consume content from Amazon, even if it’s not on an Amazon-branded device. X-Ray for movies and TV shows may eventually come to Android and iOS as X-Ray for books is already available in many Kindle apps.
X-Ray is more important than you may think at first. If the experience is not compelling enough, customers will neglect their tablets and Amazon won’t make any money from those users. That’s why Amazon cut the price of the Kindle Fire HD 8.9″ as well from $299 to $269 for the base model. It’s still the best way to tap into Amazon’s ecosystem. Amazon now wants to get the best tablet they can make in everyone’s hand so that people can start reading and watching content — Amazon’s content.
The other day we reported that according to the rumor mill, Amazon could be priming themselves for a release of a $99 Android tablet. Considering that the Kindle Fire was Amazon’s first Android tablet and one of the cheapest at that time, this rumor wasn’t completely out of the question, although it did sound too good to be true. Alas it really was because in a statement Amazon released to The Verge, Amazon refuted those rumors, claiming that a $99 tablet is not happening since they are already at the lowest price points possible for the hardware.
When the Kindle Fire was first announced, many were wondering how Amazon was able to price it so cheap. It turned out that every Kindle Fire Amazon sold was at a loss, but we guess Amazon was banking on customers purchasing content from them to cover their losses, such as music, games, and e-books. Taking this into account, we guess it is understandable that Amazon might be having a hard time hitting that $99 mark, but we’re guessing that if they could they probably would, just to cut out the competition from the likes of Google’s Nexus 7.
By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Apple Adds ‘Offers In-App Purchases’ Warning To App Store Descriptions, XCOM: Enemy Unknown Coming To iOS This Summer,
Amazon introduced Whispercast for Kindle back in October of 2012, and now the service is getting an update that allows it to deploy not just books and documents, but also apps. that means organizations like schools and businesses can now widely deploy apps across a number of Kindle Fire devices quickly and easily.
The service improves on the previous way of getting the same app onto a number of different Kindle Fire tablets owned by a single group, which actually required a manual install using everyone’s individual user account. Now, they can not only push out apps from the Amazon Appstore to all of their target devices, but they can also use Whispercast to send an invite to employees who have their own BYOD Kindle Fires. Once those employees join up with the program, they can be gifted the relevant Fire apps direct to their existing accounts.
It’s a pretty convenient feature, and free to use, which makes it all the more attractive. Back when Amazon first debuted Whispercast, it was pretty clear they were trying to make the decision about which platform to choose for broad device deployment easier. Schools benefit immensely from this kind of wide deployment, which, partnered with the Kindle Fire’s lower cost of entry, might help it become a more attractive option for organizations who might otherwise be leaning towards iPads.
Apple offers centralized app distribution to a range of deployed iPads via third-party MDM solutions, but now with Whispercast’s expansion into app territory it can offer some of those same functions without requiring third-party software or solutions, though it is less flexible and extensible than many MDM offerings. It was a natural next step for Amazon to introduce app deployment to Whispercast, so now that it’s here it’ll be interesting to watch if this moves the needle on institutional Kindle Fire adoption.
Amazon has announced a couple of important details for fans of its Kindle Fire HD 8.9-inch tablet. While the tablet has finally launched in Europe and Japan, buyers in the US can now purchase the tablet at a lower price. Originally, the tablet sold for $299 with Wi-Fi only.
The new price for the Wi-Fi only tablet with 16 GB of storage and special offers is $269, a price cut of $30. If you don’t want to deal with advertisements, the tablet will now cost you $284. The 32GB version is going for $299 with offers, and $314 without. This also marks the first time that tablet fans in Japan, the UK, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain have been able to purchase the 8.9-inch Kindle Fire HD.
US customers will also now be able to buy the tablet featuring 4G connectivity starting at $399. That is about $100 cheaper than the tablet was a couple weeks ago. The hardware inside the tablet remains the same, only the price has changed.
Good news for those located outside the US. Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD 8.9 is now available in a select number of countries in Europe, including the UK, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain, as well as Japan. To celebrate the expansion, Amazon also dropped the price of the tablet to $269 in the US, with the 4G version now starting at $399.
Previously, the 8.9-inch version of the Kindle Fire HD was priced at $299, while the 4G version costed $499, which means that the WiFi-only model received a $30 price drop, while the 4G LTE model received a healthy $100 drop, making it even more tempting to jump with both feet in and grab the tablet at a good price.
The Kindle Fire HD 8.9 features a nice 1920×1200-resolution display, which provides 254 ppi of pixel density. The tablet comes with a Texas Instruments OMAP4470 dual-core processor clocked at 1.5GHz with 1GB of RAM. The WiFi-only version comes in 16GB and 32GB flavors, while the 4G model comes in 32GB and 64GB variants.
The Kindle Fire series of tablets are great companions if you’re particularly close with Amazon’s ecosystem. Prime members get a lot of exclusive features with the Kindle Fire software, including the ability to rent ebooks for free using Amazon’s lending library, something that normal Prime members can’t take advantage of.
Amazon Kindle Fire HD 8.9 launches in Europe and Japan, US version now $269 is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
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Amazon just announced that it would be dropping the price of the 8.9-inch version of its Kindle Fire HD. The tablet will now cost $269 for the Wi-Fi only version and $399 for the Wi-Fi and LTE version. The Kindle Fire HD 8.9″ is now available in the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Japan as well. Canada won’t get the device this time around.
The Kindle Fire HD was already available in Europe, but only the 7-inch version. With today’s news, Android tablets will become more widely available and could represent a bigger market share in Europe and Japan.
Amazon may have needed more time to ramp up production before releasing the Kindle Fire HD 8.9″ in other countries. Even though it is less popular than its cheaper brother, the tablet received a price cut as well. John Biggs found it a bit too big to use it comfortably.
Many Android tablet apps are still scaled-up smartphone apps. Developers need Android tablets to catch on in order to start considering it as a separate platform. IDC predicted that shipments of Android tablets may overtake those of the iPad in 2013. It could represent a turning point for mobile developers and startups.
While Amazon still hasn’t released its rumored smartphone, the company offers a wide range of tablets, from small form factors to bigger LTE tablets. Releasing an Android app in the Amazon Appstore is now an important step — Google Play isn’t enough if you want to target a large number of tablets.
As always, Amazon doesn’t release sales figures and it is difficult to predict whether the Kindle Fire product line is popular. If that is the case, it means that Google’s strategy with Android is not succeeding. Amazon forked Android to release its own tablet operating system, leaving behind many Google apps and services.
We think it’s safe to say the UI redesign for Gmail 2.0 for iOS has received a large amount of praise from its users as the company is now expanding the UI design into its web apps.
Gmail users who access their email account with its mobile web app or Gmail Offline will now be able to enjoy the same UI design as Gmail 2.0 for iOS users have been enjoying for a few months now. Users will also be able to use Gmail 2.0′s search and Google Calendar integration, which were two features Google received a high amount of praise for from its iOS users.
Not only will the 2.0 redesign be available for iOS users who prefer to live life app-less, but it is also available for Android, BlackBerry and Kindle Fire users. As for Windows Phone users, you’ll have to wait your turn as Google has yet to deem you worthy of partaking in the new UI changes. Hopefully that will change soon considering how much better the new UI is compared to the previous version.
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