7-inch Amazon Tablet launches in October, 10-inch Version in Q1 2012 | Hacker News Reader

7-inch Amazon Tablet launches in October, 10-inch Version in Q1 2012

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57 pointsluigionline37 comments

"I just hope Amazon is able to give their Android tablet a clean and modern design. I still think that the Amazon Kindle is one of the most ugly gadgets on the market, despite its mega success."

First the Windows Explorer and now this. Design is not minimalism. For something that is not touch-based, the Kindle is actually a very clean and modern device appearance-wise. And it also has great design. A good design is one that is easy to use for a given context, something the Kindle gets right most of the time. If Windows Explorer can get my mother to stop asking how to copy mp3 files from one folder to another than their redesign is a good one as well.

Looking good is only a small part of designing something actually.

If you compare the Kindle to Ram's ten principles to "good design" it definitely qualifies as a well designed product.

Something that I learnt from my fiance, who is a designer, is that most people don't understand design. They understand trends:

"This looks similar to all the other popular things that I see, therefore it must be well designed."

Thanks for the tip re Dieter Rams's ten principles of good design. I hadn't heard about them.

http://www.vitsoe.com/en/us/about/dieterrams/gooddesign

PS: On a side note, I compared Vitsoe's en-gb and en-us versions of this page. Surprisingly, there is a difference. The en-us version omits a section about UK government's "Made by Britain" campaign. :)

Thank you. This is the exact same sentence that was bothering me. The kindle would be nerve-wrecking if i had to slide for every new page view. I hope that they don't strip the new kindle of its physical keys.

People don't get usability but they get how to impress others. That's why people think it's an improvement if typing on a phones takes thrice the time. It looks cooler. That's why people like driving those new mini coopers, that look cool from the outside but are just a mess in usability.

Re: usability -- Getting OT, but my wife and I are aiming to get a used Mini not because they look cool, but because they're small and fuel efficient. We've driven the Smart car, it's transmission is borderline scary. I would never pay the price a new one costs, but used prices are very reasonable. We have a Dodge Magnum, which is extremely usable, but not so duel efficient, and the size makes it harder to find parking for. Sometimes we need to get somewhere in the city where public transit and taxis don't really make sense. A Mini proves extremely usable in that case.

(Okay, so there is also something kind of humorous about having one car named Magnum and another named Mini)

My Mini is surprisingly fuel efficient (40+ MPG on the highway), small on the outside, big on the inside, and fun to drive. But as woodpanel said, the Mini is indeed a usability mess inside. Pretty much every switch, button, and knob is a WTF. For a good example, be sure to ask the salesman for a demo of the Mini's satellite radio.

OT, but I have to answer!

If you live in the US, I'd assume that for you guys there's not so much a difference between a mini and a smart in size, as they are both miniatures compared to a magnum ;-) Here in Europe I see them in different classes. I have driven them both. My experience:

- The Mini has a lot more style, comes across as more fun since it has a premium touch (You can see minis in the most expensive neighbourhoods). In action though, almost anything of the pretty stuff sucked. And speaking of the interior's premium touch: it looked good but felt actually kinda cheap. If I want good carpentry for that price, I'd get me a bmw 1.

- The mini isn't "mini" at all. upside: feels spacy. downside: you pay a big premium for the brand name, yet it's brand core - being super small - has vanished (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MINIandClassicMini.jpg). And it's not cheap! (the smart isn't cheap either but it's definetly small, I have always found parking space near my destination)

- it's reenactment of the old mini, seats you very low so you have a hard time guessing where your car's nose exactly is, the nose's roundness makes it worse (the smart simply has no nose).

- the front-window is actually kinda small (smart: the front-window feels larger/higher, giving you good vision). the rest of the windows are even smaller, you have a bad idea of what's going on outside (smart: way better)

- the rare front-window vision gets wasted by the minis gigantic rear-view mirror and its unbelievable thick frame so even more vision gets wasted

- there's a glove box in it, as in any other car. but in the mini it has to be special. so you can't pull it open, you have to push it, and then you have to wait until the hydraulics push the cover away. It brings so much joy at the toll booths ;-)

- the arm rest is rendered useless by it's integrated ipod-docking station, becuase its cover always sweeps open.

- the big tachometer in the middle of the console was at first confusing, then annoying, yet hard to ignore, since once in a while some functions are only accessible through it. it has a terrible ui. i'm sure in the future there will be a mini version where you have to swipe your left window, to make your turn signals flash.

- the uselessness of the big tachometer is proven by the real tachometer that is mounted on the steering wheel (the mounting gives it an even cheaper feel)

- the buttons in the center-console were mentioned. they suck. you have buttons, and then you have rings between the buttons, thus the main advantage of buttons (using them while not looking at them) is gone.

- it might be a classic mini feature, but putting the window lifter buttons in the center console makes the co-driver's arm getting in the way of the driver, who gets interrupted operating the shifter (ok, not a problem in the US).

- disco lights. you pay the price of an bmw and have to know that some of that money went into those interior neon-lights. Those lights are indirect, so the actual bulb is covered while the light is emitted through some sort of tray. the result: black holes in your side shelf. things that fall into that are lost forever ;-)

- (many more points)

If you buy a mini, you pay for the reputation of it's past models, which was built on functionality and price. You pay for what it reenacts, but not what it is. A smart isn't cheaper, but functional - and what makes me fall in love with it, when compared to the new mini: the smart dosn't acts to be something it isnt. There's no retro looking fake-metal dashboard made out of plastic.

"The kindle would be nerve-wrecking if i had to slide for every new page view."

Page turns on the iPad's kindle app are accomplished by touching the edges of the virtual page. No swiping required.

But you can't configure it like the physical kindle, where page turn on either side up higher is "back" and lower is "forward." So if you're going to hold it one-handed, that either has to be your right hand or you do this weird left-arm-around-the-back contorted thing. Sounds trivial, but it's an important problem if you, say, drink coffee and have little left-hand coordination :-)

GoodReader has alternative page turn virtual zones, which I definitely take advantage of.

The mobile apps are the same way; I don't imagine the tablet will be any different.

To me the look of the Kindle 3 is pretty good, but the feel of the case and buttons is of extremely cheap creaky plastic.

My Kindle 3 feels very solid, it never creaks or flexes. The top-shell's plastic tactile sensation does literally feel cheap, but I've not had any complaints about its structual build quality or durability. The only issue I've had is that the button lettering paint wears off fairly easily.

Looking good is only a small part of designing something actually.

Totally agree. After using the Kindle 3 for a few weeks, it's great because it gets out of your way. I've heard complaints about the keyboard, but it's a godsend for an active reader who takes lots of notes (like me).

Amazon's 7-inch will be its answer to the Nook Color, and will probably hit the same price point. It should be no more expensive than $250 and maybe as low as $199. Amazon might even use ads to reach the low point. It will be slightly faster and a more fully fledged Android device. Amazon is probably betting this is the device that will sell through the roof.

Amazon's 10-inch will be more like the Kindle DX than an iPad killer. It will just be available for users with very specific use cases and sales expectations will be low. It should be priced between $400 and $500, double whatever the 7-inch costs. Amazon can't have high hopes going up against the iPad after seeing the bloodbath of 2011, but there's not a lot it can do about it either. At the very least it will make the smaller tablet look like a better bargain by putting it next to a much higher priced alternative, which I suspect is the role the Kindle DX plays more than anything else.

This is not a bad position to be in. Another HN comment said it best: Amazon is the one company who can afford to sell products at a loss, since they can potentially recuperate on content sales.

I'll also agree with the Amazon "Kindle Color DX" theory you put forward here. They'll cross-subsidize entry tablet costs with a higher-end model.

Aside: does Apple do the same with the iPad? I imagine they don't make a lot on 16GB models; instead, I assume they make lots of money by up-selling $4-8 in flash memory for $100 per module.

Everyone keeps framing this as a competitor to the iPad, but it's going after a market that is not currently buying tablets at all. People who can't afford an iPad or don't want one at the current price:features ratio. If this means anything for the iPad, it's that it may expand the android tablet market enough to attract app developers, making it more sensible to produce an android tablet with high quality expensive hardware in the future, when the app eco system is more mature.

From the same article - this is all nonsense.

  The details about the Amazon Tablet(s) are still very vague. 
  Amazon is doing a great job so far to keep everything secret. 
  It is assumed that Amazon will use Android, but not even that is sure. 
  Rumored screen sizes range from 7 over 9 to 10.1-inches.

And the real article the nonsense is based on

http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20110831PD211.html

"We have seen reports that one of the major weapons Amazon wants to use against the iPad is price."

Finally someone gets that this might be a good idea.

Except it's not a good idea. It's never been about price. Otherwise Apple would've never succeeded with the iPhone. There are tons of cheaper smartphone options out there yet people are still flocking to the iPhone. Consumers today are trending towards quality and usability, even if it costs them slightly more.

Nonsense. Of course it's partly about price. If it weren't about price then why doesn't Apple just raise their prices by a factor of 10 and really make a killing? Why did the Touchpad that had just totally flopped become a hot item when sold at a 80% discount?

Really price is just one way to differentiate a product from others in the same niche. Features, specs, manufacturing quality, app ecosystem, design, brand, usability, etc. are others. Those tons of low-end cheap smartphones are at least as critical to Android becoming the most popular smartphone platform as the ones that instead compete with the iPhone by better specs.

Right now Honeycomb tablets aren't all that good at positively differentiating themselves from the iPad in any useful way. Maybe some people desperately need some particular Android feature that can't be added to iOS in any way, or really dislike Apple. Not really a solid foundation... The closest exception is probably the Eee Transformer.

The real question is whether some other manufacturer really can lower the price enough to really make it a differentiating factor.

There's no margin in touchpads if you want to undercut Apple, but I bet Amazon doesn't care. They want eyeballs. Amazon is really good at datamining, and they already have your credit card details. If you interact with any channel they control, they will find a way to shake you down.

HP and the rest don't have that advantage - they need to make money off the touchpads, and Apple can undercut them by controlling the App store and locking down supplies.

"There's no margin in touchpads if you want to undercut Apple, but I bet Amazon doesn't care. They want eyeballs."

The same goes for Google-rola. Should be an interesting next couple of years for the tablet business in terms of seeing how low these non-Apple players are willing to go on hardware price in an attempt to prop up their real moneymakers (content, ads).

There are tons of cheaper smartphone options out there yet people are still flocking to the iPhone.

But they're also flocking in at least as large numbers to the cheaper Android phones. Amazon doesn't have to beat the iPad to win.

Just because they compete on price doesn't mean they will cut quality or usability. That is what I feel is wrong with the existing inexpensive tablets, they cut those corners, but Amazon isn't known for doing that.

I have 30-40 eBooks (mostly PDF) which aren't very suitable for a Kindle because they're mostly photographic books and/or programming with nicely highlighted text. I'm hoping Amazon have realised that eBooks are not restricted to B&W text and are producing a device to serve that market.

I am so scared that this mythical new tablet will use a glossy screen, just like almost every other color tablet out there.

I say soft prayers at night that Amazon will build on the readability of the Kindle's screen and make their new device have that same soft matte finish.

Let's hope they're right on the much lower price. There's a lot of places I'd like a little web tablet that I just can't risk my $500 iPad.

It sure would be a disappointment if it's just another tablet that costs the same as an ipad but that's not nearly as good.

I'm not sure why so many of these speculation articles don't mention the NOOK Color, which is a 7" Android-based tablet primarily concerned with reading with a secondary focus on media, that has a specialized Android app market. Price: $250. There's your target. The story with a 10" will be different, but it sounds like that's a question for next year.

Agreed. I played with a Nook Color a couple weeks ago and was impressed. If I could figure out a reason to add yet another piece of portable electronic junk to my collection (alongside a Nexus One, a Dell netbook dualbooting Linux or Mac OS X, a laptop, a Kindle, a DS, and probably other crud I can't remember now), it's what I'd buy. It's cheap enough to nearly be an impulse purchase, it seemed fast enough and powerful enough for what I'd want to use it for (though the netbook with a keyboard works better, since writing is mostly what I imagine I'd want to use it for), and it was cute and fun to play with.

So, yeah, there's already a low price point competitor to the iPad, though it's not being marketed as such. B&N may be making a mistake in not pushing it harder as a full-featured tablet...but maybe they know its limitations better than I do. At that price point, it almost certainly is similarly specced to a very low end Android phone, so probably can't actually run a lot of bigger apps effectively.

B&N isn't making a mistake in not pushing it as a tablet...because it's not a tablet. It's an e-reader that just happens to have a little web browser and app store mechanism in it. B&N is selling these at a loss (or at least breakeven) hoping for the makeup in book sales. They can't be running around telling everyone that it's great as a web tablet and ignore the book thing.

if Amazon manages to make their 7-inch tablet the "netbook" of tablets than it has a winner.

> Can a 7-inch tablet mess with the iPad?

annnd, this is what is wrong with blogs, media, news sources today.

leave the damn makers alone. if every tablet has to be compared to iPad all the time, where is the place for innovation or simply "being different"?. why can't they come with something on their own?

I do hope they'll still continue their Kindle line though.

Presumably this is going to be called the "Kindle Tab" or something like that, they've built up great brand loyalty to Kindle. I don't think they're going to discontinue a product that sells as well as the Kindle and nails a specific use-case the way it does.

As long as their tablets aren't using eInk, I'm sure there will remain a huge market for the existing Kindle.

Source: http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20110831PD211.html

I'd love a 7-10" tablet that had an e-ink screen on one side and an lcd on the other.

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