Kindle Fire

Kindle Fire is not the champion for Android tablets, but it is the right product for Amazon.

I watched review and comparison videos on YouTube as I have not bought a Kindle Fire yet.  From those videos I had the impression that Kindle Fire is not as fast as Apple's iPad 2.  The page loading and refresh speed is slower than that on iPad 2. The touch response does not seems to be as smooth.  By most measures for a web browsing device and a game console, I doubt it can compete with iPad 2.  Nevertheless, I still think it is a good and smart product.

I have complained about last generation's Kindle reader earlier this year. This new generation of Kindle answered my complaints. The touch screen takes away the clumsiness for users to interact with contents. Compared with the previous generation, Kindle Fire provides all the needed improvements in terms of color display, faster page flipping and rendering. It also provides a comparable video experience as iPad 2. Given its price, it is an adequate tablet but an outstanding content viewer. It is exactly right up Amazon's alley for all the digital contents it wants to sell.

Kindle Fire is a smart product with a right compromise and feature focus. I may buy one for my daughter to read on. But I am sure she will ask for my iPad when it comes to Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja. Young users do not settle for their game experiences.

HP's next tablet is Windows 8

HP's new CEO, Mrs. Whitman, said the next tablet product from HP will use Windows 8.

http://moconews.net/article/419-hps-whitman-were-going-to-make-windows-8-tablets/

Two features caught my attention when I took a look at those Windows 8 introduction videos for the Metro Interface, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihcIlg37QKU and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHrcz7zcm_8. One is the touch area outside the visible part of screen and the other is the support of the original windows interface.  A touch area outside the screen requires the same high density touch sensory to be integrated beyond the viewing portion of display. The desktop Windows user interface requires more memory.  Both add to the BOM cost.  

Based on the iPad 2 3G tear down, the BOM cost is around $326.  This number came with the fact of Apple's own A5 processor and the low memory usage enjoyed by iOS.  A WiFi-only iPad 2 would cost even less. Enough hand-held Windows devices had suffered under-provisioned hardware and failed so far.  HP's decision of adapting Windows 8 will put itself between the choice of higher cost per unit or unsatisfactory user experience.  Mrs. Whitman has one shot on this one.  A decision of using Windows 8 may seem to be a no-brainer.  It may turn out to be an ill-thought decision because it seemed to be such a no-brainer.

Value add

Intel is talking about thin and light PCs, again.
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-05-31/intel-seeks-to-challenge-apple-s-ipad-with-new-ultrabook-pcs.html
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/computers/computex-2011-intel-unveils-ultrabook-talks-medfield-tablets/6004

Since 2007, there were Ultra Mobile PC, netbooks, and OLPC (my blogs on UMPC). It was clearly the writing on the wall for the system vendors that the mass market was ready for easy-to-use computing devices. But to Intel and Microsoft, it was just a series of protection measures to delay and deter. Intel gave up StrongARM and kept its low-end CPUs one or two steps behind what the market needed them. Microsoft tried to put a limit on netbooks to under 9-inches upon its OS licensees. Maybe it was important to protect the margin of company's bread-and-butter products. But to end users, those decisions did not add any value to them. In the end, competitors step in and eat their lunch. Companies tried to protect their profit margins by preventing new product categories from happening ended up losing more.

All those decisions must have gone through a lot of deliberation, market data analysis and signatures from layers of directors and VPs in both companies. In the end, the defense looked like being built more along departmental business lines than to the battle front line. If Intel and Microsoft had worked with the trend and all their partners, the market might have been filled with different kind of interesting products than just overwhelming Apple iPad and upcoming Google Android tablets, neither uses Intel processors nor Microsoft OS.

Speaking of surprised development and different revenue sources. A Citi analyst said Microsoft makes five times more income from Android than from Windows Phones, thanks to patent licensing fees.

http://gizmodo.com/5806227/did-you-know-microsoft-makes-five-times-more-money-from-android-than-from-windows-phone

Of course, this is not a development Microsoft would like to see. After all, no company is operating and competing in a vacuum. Market cannibalization is not a complicated concept, but can be so hard to get it right for a big company.

Developers, Phones, and Applications

I recently read two articles that underlined my long-time viewpoint on applications, devices and developers.

http://www.cellular-news.com/story/48888.php
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9215832/Developers_not_phones_driving_mobile_banking_apps_

A lot of factors come in to the decision of whether to develop for a platform. It can be the accessibility to programming interface and talent poll, platform capability, application characteristics, cost and overhead, etc. Nevertheless, the dominant criterion is the volume of shipment. If a platform is sold like hot cakes, it is definitely worth taking a look. But the usefulness of this rule of thumb decreases dramatically from this point. The mystery lies within the percentage of addressable and target demographics among the user base of a particular platform.

As volume shows itself as an absolute number, yet it is a relative term. Look at this article from more than three years ago.
http://www.engadget.com/2008/02/11/whats-an-iphone-14-3m-windows-mobile-phones-sold-in-the-past-s/
I knew it had a wrong argument when I saw it three years ago. But I did not realize how wrong it was. In 2008, Windows Mobile shipped more than 16 million units of smartphones, roughly a quarter of what Nokia had shipped for the same category. Windows Mobile had more developers than iPhone OS or any other smartphone OS at that time. Microsoft was the number two smartphone OS provider and Windows Mobile was the number three smartphone platform. The number however did not carry it further. BlackBerry caught up from behind in 2008 and stood firm as number two smartphone platform (23M units in 2008 and 34M in 2009). It, too, lost momentum.

Many users of BlackBerry and Window Mobile phones are in for the access of corporate email. When the user population is so fixated on getting one thing, how can any application developer add any value to the platform? I had a colleague who said he could not get used to the touch screen of iPhone. He missed the qwerty keyboard of his old phone. When I asked what kind of applications he used on his phone most of the time. Unsurprisingly, it was the email. Being an application developer myself, I would not poll his opinion on user experience of a small device. Such a consumer is not among my target audience. This fact pretty much cut the majority of Microsoft's 16 million or BlackBerry's 23 million of 2008 out of the equation. After that, it hardly represented a volume of interest.

HP/Palm's WebOS would serve as a contrast. It has, in my opinion, an equally capable platform as any other OS, and a set of elegantly designed programming interface. But, alas, it has no volume.

Amazon Kindle experience

I bought a 6" Amazon Kindle device recently to save bookshelf space. But the user experience really fell short.

I have used the very first generation Kindle. At that time, I was evaluating the Kindle device for a work related project. I understood it was the first generation, and Amazon was not an OEM vendor. Even that its industrial design and build quality left much to be desired, I was willing to give the first generation Kindle full credit. It did what it was set out to do: to put an e-reader in front of the publishers and to persuade them to go digital. In the long run, Amazon can make a fat margin on digital contents by saving a lot on inventory, facility and distribution.

More than two years later after my first encounter with Kindle, Kindle made quite some changes to its appearance. With more and more books piling up on my bookshelves, I thought it is time for me to mingle with Kindle. I bought a couple of Kindle books and started reading. The experience was not satisfactory. It is maybe that the e-ink display took too long to refresh. It took too long to flip a page. It is fine to read a book sequentially for the first time. But after a while, I need to use those books as reference books and go back and forth among pages regularly. It is really annoying and counter productive to wait for page refresh in order to flip 3 to 5 pages.

My experience with Kindle may not be applicable to all Kindle users. Different types of books warrant different usage patterns. But I think it is time for Kindle to revamp. It was a good work to pave the digital way all the way here. Nevertheless, the gap in user experience is increasing. One misstep, the path will turn to iPad and put Amazon to a peripheral position in providing digital contents. Without a leading position, it will undercut the margin Amazon could have hoped for in promoting all those digital books and magazines.

7-inch Tablets

A lot of new tablet products are coming to the market. And they have 7-inch screens.

I have a doubt toward those 7-inch tablets. In my previous experience with those 7-inch UMPC, the most troublesome experience is to browse Internet on such a screen. The constant zooming and page sliding are annoying, to say the least. The billion pages of HTML contents on the Internet were built for laptop and desktop screens. It has been this way for the most part of Internet and it will stay that way for quite a while. For Internet devices with smaller screen like iPhone, users understand its limitation and bear with the inconvenience in exchange for its portability. Constantly re-sizing and moving browser pages on a supposedly bigger screen is defeating the purpose. Now the manufacturers are hoping to improve the portability over 10-inch tablets, yet at the expense of user experience. Is this product differentiation worthwhile?

E-reader can get by with a 7-inch screen because its contents are tailor-made for it. For tablets with this form-factor and its use cases, I cannot clearly see a consumer segment for it. For business people who are always on the road, I think they will stick with their laptops. For consumers in the living room? I, for one, will stick with 10-inch iPad, especially when it has a forward-facing camera.