Kindle Fire

Amazon outs GameCircle, it’s the Game Center for Kindle Fire games

Amazon is keen on taking its Kindle Fire tablet beyond reading e-stuff, listening to music and watching movies and has today announced GameCircle, a brand new application programming interface (API) for developers, with social gaming features akin to Apple's Game Center on iOS devices (and soon Mountain Lion Macs). It's got the basics nailed, the stuff like leaderboards and achievements. Amazon is hoping developers will quickly pick it up and enrich their Kindle Fire games and who knows, it may come in handy if the company decides upon releasing a phone of its own...

Purported iPad Mini screen size compared with other tablets

In line with all of the recent speculation regarding the rumored "iPad Mini," one developer decided to see how such a device would stack up against other popular tablets.

What you see above is a comparison between the screen sizes of various slates, including the Kindle Fire, the Nexus 7, the current iPad, and the purported iPad Mini...

Amazon launching new Kindle Fire with better display, camera in Q3?

Online retailer Amazon has reportedly informed select developers that it will be launching a new version of its Kindle Fire tablet some time in the second half of this year, possibly in the third quarter, in time for the holiday shopping season. The new Fire allegedly has a much improved display running at HD-ready 1280-by-800 pixels, matching Google's Nexus 7...

Competition: Motorola exiting feature phones, 7″ slates from Amazon, Google loom

Several reports this morning sourced from Taiwanese supply chain indicate some pretty interesting reshuffling going on in the mobile space outside Apple. Samsung is shooting to cumulatively sell ten million Galaxy S III units by early July while Motorola Mobility is mulling exiting the feature phones business in order to focus all their energies on "innovative products".

In the non-iPad space, a contract manufacturer has apparently landed orders for both Amazon's seven-inch Kindle Fire tablet and Google's Nexus-branded expected to make an appearance at Google I/O on Wednesday...

iPad web traffic drops a little, Nook overtakes Kindle Fire

An interesting change in tablet web traffic in June, as observed by ad network Chitika which sampled hundreds of millions of ad impressions across mobile apps that incorporate its solution. While they're by no means an accurate representative of the market, the numbers still outline market trend changes.

Apple's iPad dropped a bit in June, but the biggest change comes in Barnes & Noble's Nook passing Amazon's Kindle Fire. Of all non-iPad tablets, Samsung's Galaxy Tab remains the most widely-used device...

iPad maintains its US tablet market dominance as Kindle Fire continues to fall

TUAW points to a newly-published ChangeWave survey today regarding the wish lists of potential tablet buyers. And surprise, surprise, the iPad is still miles ahead of the competition in terms of consumer demand.

According to ChangeWave's data, collected from a poll of almost 3,000 American consumers, a staggering 73% of people who plan to buy a tablet in the next 90 days will be getting an iPad...

iPad gulps more than two-thirds of market as Amazon’s Fire falls from grace

A whopping 91 percent of tech moms want it for Mother’s Day instead of flowers, teachers deem it the future of education (though DoJ disagrees), it's used everywhere for work, has managed to break Amazon’s monopolistic grip on the publishing industry - and yet it shows no sign of slowing down.

And even as rivals face downturn, folks are picking their iPads like there’s no tomorrow. This is the crux of latest market tablet survey by research firm IDG which pegged Apple's worldwide tablet share in Q1 2012 at 68 percent, up from 54.7-percent in the year-ago quarter.

Apple's growth largely came at the expense of Amazon’s Kindle Fire which plummeted from 16.8 percent share in Q4 2011 to just four percent share in Q1 2012. That's a staggering 12.8-percentage points market share loss in just one quarter. Another way to look at it: Amazon shipped only 700,000 Kindle Fire units in Q1 2012...

Opinion: why Apple forced Target to boot Kindle over “conflict of interest”

As you probably know by now, this morning's big news has Target dropping Kindle hardware from their retail stores. The story has been officially confirmed by a spokesperson for the nation's second-largest discount retailer, after Walmart. The resulting finger-pointing, largely centered around Apple and its iPad, is based on an unnamed source mentioning a "conflict of interest" as Apple apparently put the arm on Target...

Kindle Fire now accounts for over half of Android tablet market

Still wondering why Apple would want to enter the budget tablet market with a 7.85-inch iPad? Perhaps this will help shine some light on the matter.

ComScore, a highly regarded research firm, is out with a new report today regarding the current landscape of Android tablets. And guess which slate is leading the pack? The $199 Amazon Kindle Fire...

New survey confirms the iPad’s lead in tablet market

Last week, iSuppli released some interesting numbers on the current state of the tablet market. The report claimed that the iPad dropped from 64 percent market share in Q3 to 57 percent in Q4, and that Amazon's Kindle Fire was able to grab 14 percent of the tablet market during the holiday quarter.

Adding to the numbers released by iSuppli, research group NDP has released their report on the current state of the tablet market, notes TechCrunch. No surprise, the iPad is still king holding a comfortable lead, with Amazon in second place...

The Kindle Fire is gaining market share but the iPad remains the king

Some interesting news has been released today regarding the recent success of the Kindle Fire, Amazon's flagship tablet device. According to iSuppli, Amazon managed to grab a 14% share of the tablet market in the last financial quarter, while Apple's market share dropped from 64% in Q3 to 57% in Q4.

Apple released the iPad 2 nearly a year ago so it makes perfect sense that demand will drop as the year goes on, especially when new products like the Fire get released later in the year. I expect market share to significantly increase further in Apple's favor when iPad 3 drops...

Amazon goes on the offensive with new Kindle Fire ad

Amazon has gone on the offensive in the company's battle for tablet supremacy by taking a price-powered swipe at its only real competition - the iPad.

The ad, which follows similar Kindle ads we have seen by showing a young lady in a bikini reading a book, shows both the new Kindle e-reader and the Android-powered Kindle Fire in use, while taking a stab at the iPad's lofty price.

Needless to say Amazon's iPad alternatives come up trumps in the new 30-second spot, with one poor chap finding himself shot down in more than one way when he approaches the woman in question...