Continuing the recent trend of slowly filling in the details of the upcoming tablet additions to the Kindle family, we have finally gotten a little bit in the way of technical specs. It is certainly true that you have to take everything these tipsters say with a grain of salt, but the timing seems right for more information to be making its way out and the site that released the information has a fairly reliable track record. Here’s what we’ve got to think about at the moment:
The first of the new Kindle Tablet devices is code-named “Coyote”. This tablet, seemingly the introductory model, will run on NVidia’s Tegra 2 processor. Not an unusual choice in the world of Android phones and tablets at the moment, but it seems to do the job fairly well. While it won’t make the Coyote stand out particularly, there’s nothing to be particularly disappointed by.
The more impressive model is code-named “Hollywood”. The Hollywood model will be making use of NVidia’s upcoming T30 “Kal-El” quad-core processor. It will likely come as little surprise to most of you that the quad-core model is likely to be ridiculously fast by comparison. NVidia has reported that the new processor will be approximately 500% the speed of the Tegra 2.
The only obvious comparison that you can draw at this point in the Tablet PC field is to the iPad. None of the others have managed to make a particularly impressive splash by comparison. Given what we know at this point, it would seem that Amazon has opted out of carving themselves off a chunk of the market to call their own and is jumping straight into contesting Apple’s dominance.
Consider what it was that gave Apple the edge in all this. Yes, they came out with a very affordable tablet and they beat everybody else out. The biggest factor, though, was their being poised to take advantage of every stage of tablet usage. You don’t just buy your iPad from Apple, you also need apps if you want to do anything. In many cases, you can’t even get by with just the app. You need media to run with the app. Apple makes a profit off of hardware, software, and media because they get a cut from every single step. Amazon is now in a position to do the same. They have themselves some new hardware, an app store, every sort of media you can think of, and an already strong following that while not as extensive as the iPhone owner community was at the launch of the iPad, is still impressive. It is obvious that the first people likely to be successfully targeted for the new device are the many satisfied customers of the Kindle since they have some experience with the company’s hardware already.
As with the Kindle, it is going to take a truly impressive product and an extensive support system for Amazon to hope to come out on top here. The thing is, they seem like they have that. Is Amazon going to come out with an iPad killer? Of course not. They are likely going to create the first meaningful rivalry that the tablet world has seen so far, though. It is to be hoped that the Kindle vs iPad competition will do as much for tablets as the Kindle vs Nook has managed so far for eReaders.
Source: http://blogkindle.com
