Amazon Takes Over Low End Tablet Market

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Amazon announced a new family of Kindles this morning, not the least of which was a new entry point of just $79.  But e-readers aside, the real news was the high end Kindle Fire that will all but kill the low end tablet makers.  Premium products at non-premium prices as Jeff Bezos put it.

A month ago when Amazon tablet was firmly ensconced in the mists of the future, several vendors were working hard to carve out a niche with low end Android tablets that were far enough below the iPad’s $500 floor to not illicit too many comparisons.

While many tablets competed in this space two leaders had emerged: Archos and B&N.  Archos made “personal video players” before tablets were cool, thus they were well positioned to simply add apps and ship a decent product (Apple complicated things by creating scarcity for tablet components but that had passed).  The other winner was the dark horse Nook Color.  While comparable in pricing and specs to many competitors, the backing of Barnes & Noble meant it would last – which made it a favorite for hackers.  Grab a Nook Color and use it as is or “jailbreak it” and enjoy a slightly subsidized android tablet.

All of the rest of the entrants on the low end have been noise or are still “coming soon” (at least in the US) except for two.  The original galaxy tab (7 incher) from Samsung is now old enough to be relatively cheap and who can forget the suddenly “limited edition” $99 HP tablet.  The latter served as a wake up call to the industry when they discovered people would buy a discontinued and unsupported tablet if the price was right – proving there was real potential below iPad levels.

With the state of the market it mind, we can examine the newly announced Kindle Fire and see why it will be killer – not of the iPad, but just about everything else:

  • Amazon is subsidizing the hardware cost so if you just want a cheap but solid android tablet hackers should deliver that option by Christmas.  Without content profits, most companies can sell their tablet for less than it costs to make.
  • Amazon has created a much simpler user interface than the standard android. They didn’t just add some widgets or whatnot they created a new one top to bottom.  This approached helped B&N grab market share and Amazon has done it even better.
  • Amazon’s content base is one of the few to rival Apple: books, music, movies, and more.  Content consumption is what tablets do best and most low end producers don’t have such a pipeline.  (B&N’s Nook Color will be the sole survive of the coming bloodbath for just this reason)
  • Specifically Amazon’s app store offers what Apple like protection and quality far beyond the general Google Marketplace and with thousands more apps than competing private app stores.
  • It remains to be seen just how good the Amazon Silk engine is at improving the mobile browsing experience but this another area where other companies can’t compete as they don’t happen to also own one of the biggest data centers in the country.

So at the end of the day, B&N has to drop the Nook Color by at least $50 to compete (and launch the Nook Color 2), and companies like Archos, well they would need to create a huge content selling service in the next oh – 6 weeks…

Yeah, good luck with that.

 

Slow Carb Diet Experiment

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So I have been looking for something new to get back down to my “fighting weight” and get ripped just in time for winter.  I recently discovered a new diet plan from Tim Ferriss called the Slow Carb Diet that takes the Lo Carb diet and adds back in beans.  Alright there is a touch more to it but that’s the gist.  Tim makes a good case for it in his book The 4-Hour Body.  20 lbs in 30 days didn’t sound too bad, so I thought I’d give it a whirl for 30 days and see how it stacked up.

Here’s the full Slow Carb plan:

  • Unprocessed Proteins:  Fish, Beef, Pork, Chicken… and Eggs (whites are best)
  • Beans: Black, Red, Kidney, Pinto, Soy… and Lentils
  • Veggies: All (go easy on corn)
  • No “white” carbs: bread, sugar, pasta, potatoes, anything fried, etc.
  • No Fruit.  Exception: small amounts of citrus juice in water or tea is encouraged.
  • No Dairy. Exception: low fat cottage cheese.
  • No Booze. Exception: up to two glasses of dry, red wine per night.

The twist: One day a week is your cheat day.  Anything in any amount is far game!

Sounds a little crazy but so far I have lost 3 pounds in the first week.  Which alone isn’t too impressive as it could be largely “water weight”, but that includes taking a 3 day road trip where I was only was “on plan” for breakfast (ie eggs & bacon).  So that is pretty good.  However the real test will be to see where I am at after week two.  The book has some other tricks with cinnamon and food photos but I don’t want to spoil it all.

Flickr FoodStream

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So I am trying out a new idea dieting aid from The 4-Hour Body as part of my Slow Carb diet experiment.   The idea is similar to the written food journals popular with many trainers, however your smartphone’s camera replaces the old pen and paper method.  Add to that a flickr.com photostream and voila the FoodStream™ was born.  I am personally using Instagram to make it happen as it is super simple, efficient at uploading, and offers some fun filters when your eggs look too dull.  Once setup, it was easy to get my latest photo from my iPhone to flickr to this site’s home page with just a few taps.

Research suggests that documenting your food will reduce your bad eating habits.  Swapping out jotting everything in a notebook for quick snaps just makes things easier.  Well almost.  I have found the hardest thing about starting a photo food journal is remembering to photograph your food.  It’s really not a natural thing to do.  But after a week, I am finally getting a hang of it.

Just so long as the occasional (often) mostly eaten plate counts too.  ;)

UPDATE:

  • After two weeks, I still constantly forget to snap my food – at least until I’m done eating it.
  • When I’m up to it, I added the meal info to the empty plate pic title.
  • Instagram’s filters are fun but a few more would be even better.
  • I’m down 4 lbs!

AMD A-Series Macbook Air? Refurbished Computers Worth It?

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As the ultraportable crowd impatiently awaits the latest Apple refresh of the svelt Macbook, an interesting new rumor has popped up. Could the next Air be powered by an AMD A-Series APU and not the expected Intel iCore? Are refurbished computers from gigarefurb worth it?

While it flies in the face of most of the industry scuttlebutt, it actually makes a lot of sense. Consider the following: Apple has been slow to move the Air away from the Core 2 Duo chips to the newer Intel chips when it often grabs the first of such silicon off the line. Cupertino also snubbed Nvidia for AMD in its latest graphic card refresh.

Assuming AMD’s A-Series APU claims are correct it would present the perfect balance of processing, graphics, and battery power for an ultralight laptop. The conventional wisdom has been that Apple is moving from the Core 2 Duo + GeForce 320M to an iCore chip with Intel’s graphics for better processing power and battery life. However that logic never sat right with me, since even the 11″ Air included discrete graphics. A move I feel proves that Apple wants above “adequate” graphics even in its tiniest laptop.

I think the iCore upgrade belief has been largely based largely on “what else would they do?” assumptions. While an iCore + GPU is the obvious solution for maximum computing power in a typical laptop, in a form factor like the Air the drain on battery life and physical size become much more important. Could the company that ripped the SSD out of its standard enclosure for form factor, really pass up the chance to offer true GPU performance without adding a second chip?

UPDATE: We have heard back from our source that Apple is considering a next generation APU (with lower TDP) for a future (significant) MBA revision not the pending one.  That will be the new iCore chips.

Why Twitter Suddenly Matters

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Yes I realize that Twitter has over 150 million users – I myself have been on it since 2009. However much of this mad rush to join has been spurred mostly by two groups: people addicted to status updates and businesses chasing after social marketing. The honest truth is that a few billion tweats later, most people have said very little with their 140 characters and most businesses couldn’t even tell you if their followers have impacted their bottom lines. Sure a small share of tech savy businesses have leverage twitter well but we’re not talking about the outliers here. No, up to this point the biggest winners have been the celebrities. Sadly, more people care about Colin Farrell’s lunch selection update than your new product launch tweet. But twitter is evolving. Rapidly.

Recently some significant things have happened with twitter that will make it matter to more than the attention starved and fan boys and girls of the world. Here’s what happened:

  1. Ubiquity Critical Mass – This was bound to happen with the size of the social bandwagon as lately every phone, tablet, TV, watch, and electric razer has integrated twitter, facebook and netflix into it. The ubiquity finally paid off after some people used it to report the news before the news crews. The shift from twitter as the endless echo chamber to first on the scene is significant to its long term success.
  2. Photo Sharing – The new twitter now includes photo sharing leaving it poised to become the top such service overnight. More importantly it gives twitter a second, independent reason to exist.
  3. Steve Jobs’ Blessing – The inclusion of twitter into the bowels of iOS 5 is less of a boon to its userbase than it is a protection of its future. As it essentially moves one the big players that could threaten it’s supremacy over to its side.
  4. Feature Integration – Much of twitter’s success is due to its simplicity of setup and use. Adding features such as automatic link shortening further simplifies tweeting for the masses.Alas, none of this solves the average business owner’s problem of leveraging twitter for their own use. However for those on the fence about twitter, it may have just gotten too powerful to ignore.