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.

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.

How do you know smart phone sizes are getting out of control ? When Samsung announce a 5.3” device. Sure the industry has been through their phase of over miniaturisation, which was technically impressive, but not that useful. In recent years, we’ve seen phones grow back to a more sensible 3.5 – 4” range, but 5.3” is just ridiculous.

Samsung try and allay any fears of size being a concern by providing a helpful graphic explaining that of course it will fit in your pocket. What’s not shown is the big warning label on that graphic that says “Not to scale” or “Females need not apply”. Sure more real estate via higher resolutions are normally welcomed on any device, but if you need 5.3” to achieve the 1280×800 resolution is quite simply too big.

5.3 inches lands in the strange domain of being not quite a smart phone and not quite a tablet, ultimately being a device that nobody wants. The same problem is played out with 7” tablets. When you chart the sizes of devices, there does appear a gap between 3-4” smart phones and tablets at 10”. What manufacturers like Samsung don’t realise is that its not an opening in the market that needs to be filled, but rather a size that’s impractical for most customers.

Samsung will sell some of these devices, just like some 7” tablets were sold, but the niche market actually looking for an in-between device will likely be 2 small to maintain a sustainable business. The device concept, as the name suggests, is to replace a traditional paper notepad. To achieve that, the Samsung Note even comes with a stylus.

More @ ThisIsMyNext

Microsoft Tech Ed conference in Australia is next week (expect lots of coverage right here), but this week its New Zealand’s turn. Turns out Microsoft spilling the beans on some brand new products. Smarter Geek is reporting that during a session titled ‘WCL101 Come and see the latest and greatest in Windows Devices’ Microsoft’s Jeff Johnson and Patrick Hevesi showed off a new Windows ‘Slate’.

Said to be a quad-core tablet, it brings thoughts of speeds and performance, but naturally concerns about battery life and heat. Naturally any tablet draws comparisons to the market leader, Apple’s iPad, which has been able to avoid these unattractive heat vents. When holding or resting a tablet, people don’t want to consciously avoid blocking that area, but at least on this model, looks like they may have to.

Its interesting to consider the need for a quad-core processor in a tablet. While the PC industry has convinced bigger numbers are always better, when it comes to tablets, is there really a need for quad-core processors and the trade-offs that come with it. More processor intensive applications like video editing are unlikely to be done on a tablet, at least today. There may well be an interface design that would be conducive and potentially faster that traditional mouse and keyboard input, we just haven’t seen it yet.

Details of upcoming devices will continue to flow in the lead up to the Build Conference next month.

More info @ Smarter Geek via All About Microsoft

Check out how Microsoft Office, specifically OneNote can take advantage of a tablet’s touch screen. In the video below, Doug Thomas showcases it running on an unreleased Asus EeeSlate running Windows 7. It looks to work pretty well for taking notes / making annotations, but does require a stylus for precise movement. The stylus is simply turned upside down to erase any mistakes.

As for the Asus EeeSlate, it looks thin and as you’d expect, very iPad-like. There’s no branding on the front surface, just a home button at the center-bottom. There’s a slot in the back for the stylus, so hopefully you won’t loose it, but we all know you will.

More information @ Channel 9.

Tech Specs [More info]
Operation System: Web OS 3.0
Display: 9.7-inch XGA capacitive, multitouch screen (1024×768 resolution)
Sesnsors: Light sensor, accelerometer, compass and gyroscope, GPS in 3G version only.
Storage: 16GB or 32GB internal
Battery: 6300 mAh battery (not sure what this translates to in real world usage hours)
Weight: 740 grams
Connectivity: Wifi-only, 3G and 4G models coming

So while there are a lot things the same, there’s also some important differences. Like the fact it has a microUSB connector (USB 2.0) and a Dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon running at 1.2 Ghz. Then there’s HP’s touchstone, which allows you to place the TouchPad on the touchstone and commence charging, no cables required.

Availability is expected this summer in the US, now specific word on international availability at this stage. Also yet to be announced is price, which is probably the single determining factor as to wether the TouchPad is a success. The other is the question of what Apple has in store with the iPad 2.

Update – Check out the video.

More information at.. Palm ?

HP also killed off the Palm brand, by announcing a two new smart phones, the HP Pre3 and HP Veer, both of which work well with the TouchPad.

Video
Main features of Honeycomb will be home screen with widgets to quickly access your mail, calendar and more.

UI
The user interface of Honeycomb looks great, at least the default one does. If this is the starting point, Google are on to a winner. It’ll be interesting to see what happens when we load Google Tablets with hundreds of apps. Hopefully there’s some kind of foldering or organisation system.

Multitasking / Fast app switching
Most of the time tablets do one thing at a time (background music exception), this means getting from one task to another requires switching out of one app to another. The video shows Android 3.0 has a very slick solution to this problem. Switching applications looks very fast and features nice animations. Google has clearly been hiring designers.

Browser
Android 3.0’s rocking a full desktop-like tabbed browser ! While there are 3rd party tabbed browsers on iOS, it’s great to see Google bring their clean Chrome browser UI to tablets.

Email
Despite having a full desktop-like browser, there’s still a tablet optimised email app. This makes everything nice and large to be more conducive to touch input. The video labels this as ‘Tablet optimized Gmail’ I’d hope other email providers are also supported. While you can import other mail accounts into gmail, not everyone will want to do this.

Video chat
Google’s bringing Google Talk to tablets, allowing video conferencing to occur. This means Android 3.0 tablets will need to have front facing cameras, audio will be another challenge. Plugging in a headset with in-line microphone may be a solution to reducing background noise. Expect Skype and other 3rd party video call apps to also be available and take advantage of the camera.

Maps
Google maps will include 3D view and Street view compatibility. At the top of the UI we can see seach, location and pins, so expect all the common Google Maps features. What would be nice is a sync between Google maps on the mobile device or desktop and your tablet, even better would be to your vehicle’s GPS.

Clearly Google are playing to their strengths and making their own experiences work really well. The biggest question is when will developers get access to the Honeycomb SDK, how easy is to use and what kind of unique experiences can a Android-powered tablet offer over competitors. Despite multiple tablets at CES announcing they will run Android 3.0, currently there’s no release date for Honeycomb.

More information about Android 3.0 from Engadget

Widely regarded as the closest iPad competitor on the market (hey at least you can buy this one), Samsung have announced Australian pricing for the Galaxy Tab. So with a smaller screen than the iPad (7” vs 9.7”), less battery life and a platform with lots less applications, how much would you expect to pay ? Sure it does have a 3MP camera with LED flash on back, 1.3MP cam on front for video conferencing, SD card slot and some other features the iPad doesn’t, but how much is that worth ?

The entry into an iPad starts at A$628, but that’s Wi-Fi only, the better comparison is the 16GB Wi-Fi/3G model that costs A$799. So Samsung please try and justify the the A$200 difference in price, cause it’s not apparently clear why people would opt for the Tab over the iPad. Sure there’s the device provides an alternative to those anti-Apple people, but even they must be asking, why not just get a laptop for $1,000.

Samsung may have had a chance at charging an exorbitant premium if they were first to market, but they aren’t. Apple’s iPad has been on the market for months and had very strong sales. This means developers have been making iPad apps for months, together with iOS4.2 due in just over a month, means the experience and maturity of the platform is already well developed.

The Samsung Galaxy Tab is playing catch-up and their price should have reflected that by undercutting the iPad to increase user adoption. Sadly they’ve decided to go for a premium price, which may be the products greatest downfall. Also don’t forget that while Android is coming on strong in the phone market, even Google said its not designed to be a tablet OS.

Update
Engadget are reporting that Samsung have promised a 10” version of the Galaxy Tab in 2011.. at what price ?

More @ LifehackerAU and Samsung

So “the” event is finally upon us. Apple’s set to announce their own, unique incarnation of a tablet. If they have their way, the Apple Tablet will set the world on fire with a level of success that’ll rival the iPhone.

Finally after weeks of speculation, the real details will be unveiled / confirmed. There’s sure to be some disappointments, regardless of how amazing the device actually is. Expectations have been elevated to an unobtainable level, even by Apple’s standards.

I’ll be up at 5am to watch all the coverage live, best bets are GDGT and TWiT Live.

Update
So the action is about to start, I’m watching coverage from a bunch of sites live.

GDGT

Engadget

TUAW

TWiT Live (seems to be struggling)

And of course lots of columns running in TweetDeck to watch the reaction on twitter.