Today in tablets – Amazon Fire vs Toshiba AT1S0
Posted Thursday, September 29, 2011 at 6:53 pm by Jason Cartwright
Content giant Amazon this morning revealed their entry into the tablet market with the 7” Amazon Fire. Priced aggressively at $199, the Fire has received some very positive reactions only. The release date for the device is not until November 15th for the US, but is sadly US only. Existing Kindle models do sell in Australia, so let’s hope it does make the journey here.
The Amazon Fire features a 1GHz dual-core processor, and 7” multi-touch display, showing off 1024 x 600 pixels. Battery life is said to be around 7hrs or 3 short feature films while tipping the scales at just 400 grams. It’s WiFi only and there’s no camera on offer, but the aggressive price point is making people overlook any short comings.
Naturally Amazon are playing to their strengths with content being the focus. Interestingly, its not just books. Built on top of Android the Kindle Fire will feature applications in an Amazon Store. It doesn’t yet, but may receive the official stamp of approval, the Google Market if they implement the required DRM.
SlashGear has a great hands-on video of the Amazon Fire. The interface looks fast, responsive and visually inviting for book readers and/or kids. Amazon can afford to be aggressive with the hardware pricing and make profit on the content, however other tablet manufacturers aren’t so lucky.
Another 7” tablet was announced today, this time from Toshiba. Yep, they sure picked a great day for it. Drowned in the Amazon-dominated news cycle, the less sexier name Toshiba AT1S0. In stark contrast, the Toshiba tablet will be available in Australia at the end of October for an RRP of A$499.
![Toshiba AT1S0[8]](http://techau.tv/blog/images/Today-in-tabletsAmazon-Fire-Toshiba_FB42/Toshiba-AT1S08.jpg "Toshiba AT1S0[8]")
It does have a couple of nice features. 8GB storage, LED backlit multi-touch display (1280×800 resolution), NVIDIA Tegra 2 and 2 HD cameras. A 5 megapixel camera with an LED flash on the back, plus a two megapixel camera on the front for video chatting. It’s refreshing to see a front facing camera higher than VGA quality for a change.
Powered by Android 3.2, the Toshiba does have the official Google approval shipping with the Android Market. Any new Android tablet released now should be upgradable to Ice Cream Sandwich, but until Google or Toshiba confirms, don’t count on it.
Unfortunately this tablet got buried by bad timing, I suppose it could have been worse, Apple could have announced the iPhone 5.
Microsoft: Australian datacentre not financially viable
Posted Wednesday, August 31, 2011 at 5:44 pm by Jason Cartwright
It’s official, Microsoft will not be building an Australian data centre. During a Cloud round table, Microsoft explained that it is not financially viable to build and run datacentres in Australia. A very long internal spread sheet is used to calculate the economics of where and when to build datacentres across the globe.
Temperature, Power Costs, Latency, Stable governments, Geography, Natural disasters are all taken into consideration when selecting the perfect site. Australia is also burdened with the 20 Million problem. Large datacentres only really make sense when used on a large scale. Unfortunately Australia’s volume of use wouldn’t match up to the cost model Microsoft want to charge for cloud services.
Despite being available in 41 countries, Azure deployments can only be published to the US, Europe or Asia. The closest being Southeast Asia, which Microsoft assures use that latency back and forward to, isn’t a problem.
Things are constantly evolving in this space. Take the new datacentre in Dublin, which can now run servers around room temperature meaning the water and cooling requirements are significantly reduced.
Some Enterprise customer needs are serviced in Australia by Microsoft partnering with providers of smaller datacentres like Fujitsu or Telstra for services like Office 365.
Interestingly Amazon have announced they are going to build an Australian datacentre. Clearly their infrastructure scale and cost models are different than that of Microsoft’s, in reality, the end consumer sees Amazon able to make it work, when Microsoft can not.
Amazon releasing interesting Appstore for Android
Posted Sunday, February 20, 2011 at 9:17 pm by James MurphyAmazon is preparing to release its new app market for Android – but there’s a difference. The Appstore will let you buy apps before you even own an Android device, enabling you to stock up on apps you know you’ll need and then install them when you receive your device. Not sure whether there’s a huge market for this kind of thing, but it’s kinda cool nonetheless. This concept follows a similar strategy that Amazon uses for its Kindle line, which also offers pre-purchasing.
Amazon’s power in the retail market alone makes this a viable concept and may pose a slight thread to the official Android Market. It’ll be interesting to see how many Android users opt for the Amazon Appstore even if they already have an Android device, or are expecting one in the near future.
Read more about it @ allthingsd.com
Kindle for PC beta now available
Posted Friday, November 13, 2009 at 3:17 pm by Jason Cartwright
If your still waiting for your Kindle hardware to arrive, you may want to start your Kindle experience with Kindle for PC.
There’s great support for Windows 7, complete with Jump Lists and a great Amazon icon to pin to your Taskbar.
Available @ Amazon
