The Nook and the Kindle will both have new models this Spring or Summer if the rumor mill is correct. According to some, Amazon is working on a new nine inch version and Barnes & Noble (B&N) is working on a new device of its own while the tablet that both are trying to compete with, the Apple iPad will be announcing it’s newest iteration next month.
Apple has removed several chart-topping games from the U.S. App Store. All of which are claimed to be copycats of other, better-known titles.
Many of Apple competitors are having trouble making products people want and, quite naturally, money therefrom. Results from Motorola, LG, Nokia and HTC have all disappointed investors and analysts in recent weeks. Fundamentally, it’s well nigh impossible to compete with Apple on the basis of “kitchen + sink” feature sets and race to bottom pricing.
Whoa, nelly. Previously, analysts predicted that Apple’s Mac + iPad computers sales would make it the world’s largest “PC” vendor sometime within the first six months of 2012. So much for those rosy expectations — who thought that the Cupertino, California company would double tablet sales last quarter.
A lot of people are all agog at Apple’s new iBooks Author App. Don’t be. Self publishing software has been around for awhile. Not only has it been around it has been used and is being used successfully to publish books that can be sold for more devices than just Apple’s. Rather than rushing headlong into software that will limit where your book can be read, look around and try out a few different programs.
Oh my goodness gracious, Kindle Fire sales are expected to plummet — plummet, I say — this quarter. Are the good times over, the end nigh? Actually, a big fall off after the holiday quarter is perfectly normal and Amazon’s tablet-ish media slate has a case of the post-holiday blues. But how blue is blue?
There has been quite a bit of back and forth on whether or not the iPad should be considered a personal computer. If it is — a reasonable conclusion by most accounts — then Apple is or very soon will be the world’s biggest computer maker. However, that’s not the end of the bad news for traditional (Windows) PC.
Liberal is as liberal does. Although Tim Cook isn’t the only gay CEO in the technology business, he is easily the most visible. Likewise Apple isn’t the only company which claims to take labor rights and environmental issues seriously, yet the Cupertino, California-based iPhone, iPad and Mac maker is routinely the only name mentioned in those contexts.
Not all tablets are computers, which are devices that are useful for “real” work. The Amazon Kindle Fire is definitely not a computer, but the latest version of Barnes & Noble’s Nook might be. One thing the iPad isn’t, however, is a PC. Honestly, if it was in any way a PC, sales would stink in equal measure.
Here is a theme that just keeps coming up again and again that begs an in depth examination. “Smartphones” running some older, often jurassic version of Android – how many devices offer Ice Cream Sandwich? — just aren’t showing up in web metrics, mobile commerce or otherwise generating the kind of data that oozes money.
Sometime in 2012, though probably no sooner than June, Redmond will ship Windows 8. Whereas nearly everyone agrees that Microsoft’s next major operating system rewrite offers traditional desktop computer users little to no reason to upgrade, it’s the company’s first and perhaps last best hope to go mobile.
Call me old, a technological fuddy duddy, but the high-speed internet gold standard is still fiber — it can be as fast as you want, and is said to excel vis-a-vis reliability and quality of service. The lead purveyor of fiber to consumers in US, however, is now saying its city-by-city rollout is all but over.
Of the three really big hardware trends in tech of the last five years – netbooks, smartphones and tablets — Dell now competes in none of them. The next building wave, ultrabooks (a.k.a. Apple’s MacBook Air), is on their radar, but all of that other new stuff has been officially jettisoned, abandoned.
The Apple iPad is king. For the moment. But Apple’s dirty tactics in fighting its competitors are unjustified.
If for no other reason, Motorola deserves credit for staying the course. Granted, it’s the wrong course, but they’re not backing down. Whereas, Hewlett-Packard is already pivoting hard and Dell chose discretion over valor, the Libertyville, Illinois company won’t let itself be swayed by either reason or market realities.
In the desktop computer space, depending on who’s doing the calculation, Apple takes from 50 to 65 percent of the profits. And, the same can be said of the smartphone market where the company garners the same share of the spoils. So, when Google’s chairman tells the world’s digirerti that Android leads iPhone, those folks are quite naturally skeptical.
Remember Christmas 2010 when Samsung bragged how many Galaxy Tabs it shipped only to waffle about the number it sold? Ultimately, Samsung sold very few and a big percentage of those that did were returned to stores by consumers. Technology watchers are now asking whether Amazon’s Kindle Fire is experiencing similar problems.
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