It’s not uncommon for major tech companies to take shots at one another. Take Samsung for example. It seems like every day a new Galaxy S3 commercial comes out bashing the iPhone. But this time, Amazon is unloading on the iPad.

Take a look at the Amazon commercial:

The main purpose of the commercial is to convince you that the Kindle Fire HD 8.9″ and the iPad have similar displays. However, while the iPad will cost you $499, the Fire HD will only run you $299. Sounds like a good deal right?

Well, not exactly. For one thing, the iPad is considerably bigger. Also, the iPad comes with a hoard of features that the Kindle Fire doesn’t have: larger display, more extensive operating system, larger list of apps, and so on.

Whether you are for the Kindle or against it, it is nice to see that someone is trying to take down the all-mighty Apple. It’s a shame that we all can’t just be friends. Amazon now joins Samsung in the ongoing feud to compare their products to Apple’s. It is a wonder that Apple never puts out much hate advertising.

Which tablet do you think is better? Do you think that Amazon was right to put out this video ad? Let us know in the comments below.

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Yesterday, Amazon started to roll out Version 7.2.2 software update for the 7″ Kindle Fire HD. The main 3 features of this update bring a camera app, Swype, and also the ability to sign up for FreeTime Unlimited.

The Camera app will give the ability to take pictures with the Kindle Fire HD’s front-facing camera. Additionally, Swype is a keyboard feature that allows you to replace typing with drawing across the letters.  Swype is also available in multiple languages.

The last new feature is Kindle FreeTime Unlimited. FreeTime Unlimited is a paid subscription within Kindle FreeTime. The service allows parents to create custom content for their children. Parents can choose which apps, book, music, etc. are available to their children.

For Amazon Prime members, the service comes at $2.99 a month per profile, or $6.99 for a family. For non-Prime members, the service costs $4.99 per month per profile, or $9.99 for the entire family. FreeTime Unlimited works on the first generation Kindle Fire and the two new Kindle Fire HD models.

You can download the 7.2.2 update and get info about updating here.

Have you gotten the update yet? Let us know in the comments below.

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While many people have turned to their iPads and Android tablets for the purpose of reading e-books, there is still very much a market for the dedicated eReader. The e-ink display is so much easier on the eyes and the battery life is way better than what you’d get from a tablet. But, which one is best?

A quick comparison has been put together with some of the heaviest hitters in this space, taking a look at the Amazon Kindle Paperwhite, Kindle, Kindle Keyboard, Nook Simple Touch with GlowLight, Nook Simple Touch, and Kobo Glo. There are others to be considered, like those from Sony or other Kobos, but these are some of the most popular and their comparison should help narrow down your choices.

Display

All six of the eReaders featured in this overview use some form of e-ink technology for their displays rather than the regular backlit LCDs you find on tablets. You’ll also notice that they’ve all congregated on the 6-inch form factor, though you’ll find other variations from Amazon, B&N and Kobo that come in other sizes. The resolutions are mostly the same, though the Paperwhite and the Glo have significantly better PPIs. It’s also noteworthy that the Glo, Paperwhite and Nook with Glowlight are the ones with lit displays for dim reading situations.

Size and Weight

Since they all have six-inch displays, the overall dimensions of all these eReaders are roughly the same. They measure approximately 165 x 120 x 10mm with some variation and they all weigh right around 170-210 grams or so. The lone exception is the Kindle Keyboard, since it has that physical QWERTY keyboard beneath the display, stretching its length to 190mm and bumping its weight to 247g.

Storage Space

Not surprisingly, all six of the eReaders also have roughly the same amount of storage space. After all, e-books are very small files and you don’t need much space. The Paperwhite and Kindle both have 2GB, while the Kindle Keyboard has 4GB. The Nooks and Kobo Glo all have 2GB, plus a microSD expansion slot. That memory expansion could prove to be an important feature for people who want to carry a lot of content with them.

Wireless

They all have Wi-Fi, but you can opt to get the Kindle Paperwhite as a WiFi+3G mdel. The Kindle Keyboard is sold only as a WiFi+3G eReader.

Battery Life

The Kindle, Nook Simple Touch with GlowLight, and Kobo Glo all have batteries rated in the 4 week range, while the Kindle Paperwhite, Kindle Keyboard and Nook Simple Touch (sans GlowLight) last twice as long at about 8 weeks. Of course, your mileage will vary based on usage, especially when it comes to how much you use the lighting features. Charging any of these eReaders will take you 3 to 4.5 hours.

Other Considerations

If you want to read in dimly lit situations, you’ll want to opt for one of the eReaders that comes with some form of lit display. That’s the Kindle Paperwhite, the Nook Simple Touch with GlowLight or the Kobo Glo. If you want to take advantage of Amazon’s gigantic library, then you’ll want one of the Kindles. If you want a keyboard, then you’ll want to the Kindle Keyboard. Of course, there are some tradeoffs if you want, say, a keyboard and a backlight, because that just doesn’t exist.

Price

This will be a big deciding factor for many people. The cheapest of the bunch is the regular old Kindle that starts at $69, but you could also consider something like the Kobo Mini (5-inch) that starts at around the same price range. It is worth noting that all Kindles come with the “Special Offers” advertising that you’ll have to pay $20 to eliminate. If you hate ads, you’ll need to factor that into the price. It’s also debatable whether the Kindle Keyboard is really worth its premium just for a keyboard.

At the end of the day, which eReader you choose will really depend on several factors. Price is one, to be sure, but you’ll also want to think about size, backlighting, and the ecosystem. Whatever the case, it’s a good time to be a consumer, because we are offered a lot more choice than when the original Kindle was the be-all and end-all of e-book readers.

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This comes straight from Walmart PR:

Recently, Walmart Stores, Inc. made a business decision to not carry current Amazon products beyond our purchase commitments and existing inventory.
Our customers trust us to provide a broad assortment of products at everyday low prices, and we approach every merchandising decision through this lens.
We will continue to offer our customers a broad assortment of tablets, eReaders and accessories at a variety of great price points. This decision is consistent with our overall merchandising strategy.

So, what are we supposed to glean from this? Well, we could think that it has to do with sales figures and the Kindle isn’t performing on Walmart’s shelves as well as they would have liked. It might also have to do with money in that Amazon might not be offering Walmart the kind of margins that it would like to have either. Then again, there could be a much more compelling reason.

Amazon directly competes with Walmart in just about everything. You want a physical book? Amazon and Walmart both sell that. You want a video game? They both sell that too. You want furniture, groceries, textiles, shoes, luggage, watches, light fixtures or bicycles? Both Amazon and Walmart sell all of that. In a sense, by stocking the Kindle family, Walmart becomes a bit of an Amazon showroom. This could be the same reason why Target decided to pull the Kindle from its shelves too.

Of course, I could be reading far too much into this, but I think it is amazing how Amazon has its hands in everything. You buy the tablet from them, so you can buy the digital content from them. Even if you buy an iPad or some other device instead, you can buy that product from Amazon too and there’s a good chance that you might get the Kindle app to buy more content. They get paid at every step of the way.

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Many people have turned to their tablets for their e-book reading needs, but the fact of the matter is that an e-ink display is still easier on the eyes. And now you can score a tremendous deal on one of the best e-ink e-book readers out there. Amazon has put the Kindle DX on sale for $110 off.

As a quick refresher, the Kindle DX features a high contrast 9.7-inch e-ink pearl screen, offering 50% better contrast for clearer text and sharper images. Unlike the backlit displays of typical tablets, the e-ink display looks and reads like real paper, giving you the best visibility in sunlight with no glare. The 3G wireless is included (Whispersync), so you’ll never have to make a monthly payment to download more content. Subscribe to a magazine and have it magically delivered to your device while you sleep.

The Kindle DX has enough storage for up to 3,500 books and has a battery life (wireless off) of up to three weeks. The global wireless coverage includes not only the United States, but throughout 100 countries and territories around the world. And yes, it has a keyboard for ease of text entry too. The regular price is $379, but you can buy it today for $269, including free shipping.

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Shipments for the first quarter of 2012 slipped all the way down to just 700,000 units, which is a mere fraction of what Amazon enjoyed during Q4 of last year. Naturally, a big part of this has to do with holiday gift buying, but Amazon still wants to sell as many of these puppies as it can. And that’s why several Amazon local deals are popping up with $30 off coupons, bringing the price of the Kindle Fire down to just $169.

Of course, Amazon isn’t really out to make money from the hardware; they’re in the business of selling you content for that e-reading tablet. So, should Amazon need to compete with a $199 Google Nexus 7 tablet, I wouldn’t be surprised if the online e-tailer giant decided to slash prices even further. My fingers are crossed for a $99 Kindle Fire, but I think a $149 semi-permanent price point could prove likely.

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The allegation is that Apple colluded with several book publishers to keep the prices of e-books higher in an effort to limit competition. More specifically, it says that this collusion was in direct response to the lower prices being offered by Amazon, which is known to sell best-seller e-books at $9.99. The publishers still wanted their books sold, but at $9.99, they weren’t making enough money.

And thus, the publishers had the same goal as Apple: keep the prices higher. It is “hard to settle a lawsuit when you know you have done no wrong,” said Macmillan (Holtzbrinck Publishers) CEO John Sargent. “Macmillan did not collude.”

The iBookstore from Apple is estimated to have about a 10-15% market share among e-books, compared to the around 60% that the Amazon enjoys, though that figure is down from the 90% it had some time back.

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Whatever the hiccups the dedicated cloud-supported Web browser for Amazon’s Kindle Fire had been experienced in the past is irrelevant now. Hacker TyHi from XDA-Developers has built a Silk package that can be ported to CyanogenMod 7 ROM for the same Kindle Fire, then to many other rooted devices running CyanogenMod 7, or devices running some MIUI custom ROMs. “Many” here means not all devices, but the spread of Silk widens, so to speak, by the supporting efforts of hacker named puneet_champ who corrected permissions and repackaged the Silk app. Procedure to get you Silk on your non-Amazon rooted device is pretty simple:

1. Download the pack here or here.
2. Use Root Explorer to copy the lib files to /system/lib set permissions the same as the others.
3. Install all of the .apks like you would side load.
4. Copy the com.amazon.cloud9-1.apk from /data/app to /system/app
5. Reboot and enjoy

However, there are still plenty of reports on force closures, or mess-ups with Amazon accounts and syncing.  So if your device is not mentioned as a successful port in this database, you might wait a little bit longer. Owners of Nexuses and other devices running ICS may also want to wait a tidbit longer: adjusting Silk into a compliance with the Ice Cream Sandwich Android framework continues.

When success stories are reported, results are dubious still. First, just a simple porting of the Silk browser to other than Kindle Fire devices are nowhere in the position to cure inherent problems with the overall Amazon cloud support for Web browsing. Moreover, an influx of many devices running Silk without Amazon’s permission might worsen the workload for that cloud even more. Second, many devices where Silk was ported to were just Android phones with their smallish screens. Navigating controls of Silk just don’t scale down gracefully for these, as Silk is technically a browser for tablets with their bigger screens.

Me, I didn’t put Silk on my Nook Color just yet.

The post Amazon Kindle Fire Silk Browser Ported to Other Android Devices appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

Over the busy holiday period, iPad sales were reported to have stumbled due to the growing popularity of Amazon’s Kindle Fire. At a minimum, Apple missed out on $500 million in sales, Morgan Keegan analyst Travis McCourt said. As per AllThingsD report this figure of potential losses of unsold iPads is likely pushing the $1.25 billion range, though, if calculating between one and two million units being spurned for the much cheaper Kindle Fire. McCourt is also calculates that Amazon Fire has likely sold 4-5 million units this holiday season, which probably means maybe 1-2 million cannibalized iPad sales at most. It’s not a big dent in overall iPad sales for the quarter which are believed to reach between 13 and 16 million units, but before the launch of the iPad 3 it might push Apple into discounting their previous iPad models into the rumored $299 territory.

Contrary to most popular beliefs that  theAmazon Kindle Fire has manufacturing costs of around $200…$220, these calculations may prove wrong if we deal with product orders for which may exceed 10 million units or more. In other words, Amazon might be ready for slashing its Fire price down to $149. A $299 iPad might still be attractive to many, but pricing a tablet below $150, or even the present $200 has proven that there’s a growing army of new economy-conscious customers out there. Such a customer, after buying a Fire, has much less of chance to buy an iPad too, even if heavily discounted.

Estimates above don’t take the Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet and discounted Nook Color and older Nook sales into account. With one to two million unit sales it might be not be so much, yet it is sizeable for Apple: customers of Barnes & Noble Nooks may also refrain from purchasing an iPad in addition to what they have already spent on a Nook.

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In the past we covered an XDA Developer forum member’s semi-successful attempt to get the CM7 ROM running on the Kindle Fire. Now it seems that yet another person has gotten CM7 running, this time with more success. Jeff Benjamin has taken things a step further and has even posted a detailed tutorial and video for installation of the CyanogenMod 7 (custom ROM) on Amazon Kindle Fire.

Kindle Fire has just one hardware button, and this fact makes it extremely difficult and challenging to run ClockworkMod (CWM) recovery on the device. Nevertheless, with the concerted effort of the finest XDA developers CWM for Fire has got its unique “one-button” version and fully capable of installing CyanogenMod 7 on Fire now.

CWM is a must when dealing with early development ROMs because these highly experimental ROMs might melt your tablet in no time: I wonder why they chose to call their e-reader “Fire” in the first place? If you are good with running ADB commands from the host PC, the tutorial is quite sufficient in bringing about a desired result, its steps are illustrated by TWRP, for example) which is still under development, but the whole routine works.

What doesn’t work is sound, and probably some other regular (for CM7, at least) features. A similar “soundless” ICS port we wrote about recently may have the same reason for being mute: stock Kindle Fire ALSA sound drivers might have got some undocumented and misunderstood tweak when entered the AOSP/CM7 repositories.

With the Ice Cream Sandwich advent to the scene, there might be little interest in running CM7, a customization of Gingerbread on Kindle Fire. Still, from a developer’s point of view the CM7 on Fire experiment is a good training school and a virtual lab to test many new components that are needed to be implemented when porting ICS. So far, CM7 for Kindle Fire runs on stock Kindle Fire’s kernel which is quite insufficient to run ICS.

We’ve included the video tutorial below, but we highly recommend you checking out the site for yourself if you plan on installing this ROM:

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