Amazon's Appstore has gone live in Japan, giving Japanese users the chance to download Android apps to their smartphones, tablets, and new Kindles. The store will include the same apps as available elsewhere in the world, as well as Japan-specific titles from regional carriers and developers.
Amazon has trimmed the price of its Kindle Fire tablet for Cyber Monday, bringing the 7-inch ereader slate down to $129. Available on both the "Special Offers" subsidized model or - for $144 - the non-subsidized versoin without adverts, the discount means Amazon's tablet temporarily undercuts Barnes & Noble's NOOK HD and Google's Nexus 7 by $70.
Amazon's Kindle Fire HD 8.9" has begun shipping, with the LTE-enabled version due to ship out next week, although the stock of the Android slates is already tight. Available ahead of schedule, the Kindle Fire HD 8.9" has a 1920 x 1200 254ppi display and runs Amazon's customized Android OS on a TI OMAP4470 processor with SXG544 graphics; the WiFi-only model is priced at $299, while the 4G version starts at $499.
Amazon Game Studios has launched its first title for Kindle Fire users, Air Patriots, complete with GameCircle achievements and Whispersync for synchronizing progress to the cloud. The game - also available for iPhone, iPad, and Android users - is a simple tower defense style title, but what makes it distinct is that it's the retailer's debut mobile game, as Amazon attempts to strengthen its position against Apple and Google.
Amazon has launched the Kindle Fire, Kindle Fire HD, and Kindle Paperwhite in Japan, alongside a new Japanese-language Kindle Store. Over 50,000 Japanese-language ebooks, plus over 15,000 manga titles, pad out the Amazon.co.jp Kindle Store, the company says, alongside English books as well, for a total of over 1m titles when the electronic store opens its virtual doors on Thursday.
This week the folks at Amazon have made it clear that they continue to mean business with their line of Kindle Fire tablets, today calling the Kindle Fire HD the "#1 best-selling product across all of Amazon worldwide." We've had some suspicion rise up in comments and emails regarding Amazon's press releases regarding their own sales suggestions such as this one, so until we're certain Amazon actually does specify that the Kindle Fire HD actually literally did sell more units than any other product on the Amazon website, we'll keep with the quotes. The term "best-selling" could also mean "sold as many as we made" or "did just as well as we expected it to."
While tablets are great for browsing the web and playing games, they're also becoming great devices to read digital content on like magazines and newspapers. According to marketing and analytics firm comScore, Amazon's Kindle Fire tablet has the highest readership rates of any other tablet, including the iPad and Barnes & Noble's NOOK Tablet.
Amazon has launched Whispercast for Kindle, a new mass-deployment and management system for ebooks - and soon apps - on Kindles and Kindle apps for schools and businesses. Intended to allow Kindle titles to be bought and shared out among students and employees, as well as remotely control device passwords, wireless settings, and what titles can be purchased. Meanwhile, Amazon says Whispercast for Kindle will soon be able to handle distributing and managing Kindle Fire applications.
Amazon makes no profit on its Kindle hardware sales, CEO Jeff Bezos has confirmed, with the ereaders and Kindle Fire tablets sold "at our cost" so as to promote ebook, video, and music downloads. The online retailer has long been tight-lipped on its pricing strategy around Kindle, with ongoing rumors that the hardware was sold with minimum profit in mind or, even, at a loss. That's not quite the case, Bezos told the BBC.
In a new study that was released yesterday, it's said that around 25% of American adults own a tablet. The iPad has the greater market share, but not by much. 52% of tablet owners have an iPad, while the remaining 48% own an Android variant. Around the same time last year, the iPad owned 81% of the tablet market share.
The online retail giant Amazon has a huge audience for selling their tablets and Kindle eReaders on the web, but when you don't have a storefront you'll take all the help you can get. In terms of brick and mortar stores there's only a handful of opportunities for Amazon's new Kindle Fire HD tablet -- and today they're losing a big one.
Last year Amazon entered the tablet and hardware market on an entirely different level with their Kindle Fire tablet. Now just 10 short months later we have a completely evolved product from the retail giant. Today we're taking a look at the new Kindle Fire HD 7-inch tablet. Everything you didn't like about the original (including that Playbook styling) has been improved for round two so lets take a look and see how it does.
