Amazon's anti-iPad arises 'in October' Amazon will answer Apple's iPad before October, according to a report citing people familiar with the matter. The Wall Street Journal reports that in the third quarter, Amazon will introduce a full-fledged Android fondleslab as well as two new versions of its existing Kindle ereader. One of these Kindles will include a …
An Android tablet made by Amazon? Given Google's track record with Android and Amazon's with the Kindle would I be right in assuming that with this new table there will be not one but two companies able to reach in and delete stuff they don't like from it?
No thanks. After the Kindle 1984 fiasco I'm never buying a Kindle or any other mobile computing device from Amazon. Piling that on top of Google's ability to delete apps they don't like from Android machines just adds insult to injury.
Computers in the future will all have the ability for every fucking corporation on the planet to reach in and mess with your apps and data, it seems.
Do you have proof of that happening? I have many apps that are either not on the market, or have been removed from the market since getting them, but they remain on my device (Motorola Droid). I have no problems with Google Android.
Also, I have a Kindle. If you purchase the books through them, sure, you can have issues, but if you purchase your books elsewhere, or get them elsewhere (like Google's giant FREE library of books), you don't have issues. They can only take back things you got from them. And you agree to their conditions when buying their DRMed items anyways.
Pretty much, what I'm saying, is that you, sir, are wrong.
Thing is, it only applies to things that were installed via the Market. If you install something from the apk downloaded from the web, then they can't touch it. The idea is that if someone starts distributing malware through the android market, they can remove it from people's phones (and thus avoid any liability).
If someone goes and installs it themselves, then Google won't touch it, and won't really care that much (as it's not their problem).
And incidentally, you can use things like Titanium Backup to remove the market link so that even if there is a recall notice, you won't lose the app.
All this "google can take things from my phone" stuff is a little overblown - all they can remove is things that you installed through their market.
... and Amazon have (a) pledged VERY publicly it was their mistake to do that (even though in fact they were selling the book (unknowingly) illegally, that's why it was withdrawn) and that they wouldn't do it again even in such circumstances.
Now the OP may not believe them, but they have said it, very clearly and unequivocally.
Any OS writer or book reader app *could* withdraw any book they wanted. If "could" is sucha concern, well don't buy an iPad, dont buy an Android, don't buy any third party book reading app, all of those *could * do whatever they wanted with a book you bought.
Or you could believe that some individuals and even corporations can make a mistake, and actually learn from that, and you stop cutting off your nose to spite your face for the sake of what might happen in some set of highly unlikely hypothetical circumstances. Its not even as if, in the case of 1984, you could never read that book again.
I have had apps mysteriously disappear from iDevices.
If you aren't in full control of the device, you aren't in full control of it. That's all there is to it. It doesn't matter who the Robber Baron in question is. It's a problem across the board.
It's a shame that most people are more like the audience from the 1984 commercial rather than the girl with the hammer.
"No thanks. After the Kindle 1984 fiasco I'm never buying a Kindle or any other mobile computing device from Amazon. Piling that on top of Google's ability to delete apps they don't like from Android machines just adds insult to injury."
Twist In A Knickers - rearrange!
That's it's it - my computer crashed so I'm never going to buy another - ever.
Firstly, to mlo0352 and Joe 35: As pointed out, my proof of this happening is articles published in The Register and elsewhere. I understand that while El Reg has its biases as any publication does, in general its articles are reasonably factual. And Amazon may have pledged anything to spin the damage, but it doesn't matter whether or not they WILL delete anything in future - what matters is that they CAN (and can thus be forced to by a judge acting on behalf of a rights holder.) They've set the precedent, and nothing they can spin can alter that. The ability for them to do so still exists in the Kindle.
Yes, I'm getting my knickers in a knot about this. Do any of you honestly not understand why this ability of companies to interfere with your devices is a serious problem? If I pay for something, IT IS MINE. This principle of trade has been a cornerstone of civilisation since mankind first learned to count. My ownership of something establishes in the eyes of the human race that I have the sole use of that item. That means that, for example, if I buy a bag of potatoes from you, it becomes my property and you cannot afterwards reach into my bag of potatoes and take one out, even if it is rotten.
By the same token, when I've paid for a device, what I put on it is mine and mine alone. Anyone who doesn't understand this simple concept and therefore isn't up in arms about this emerging trend of companies reaching into our devices is deluded, plain and simple. If you follow this line of reasoning to its logical conclusion you will end by not owning anything, not even the clothes on your back, if the companies "selling" them decide they no longer want you to have them - for "liability" or any other reason. Is this really where you want the world to go?
"If I pay for something, IT IS MINE."
Seems a simplistic conclusion, especially regarding technology receiving ongoing content, or changes. Does that mean your cable t.v. service shouldn't be allowed to update or change their offerings to you? What if you buy the content of a book online, and it is stored online rather than on your e-reader? It's not "yours" if you're out of wi-fi range.
""App store is entirely generic, completely un-protectable, and it's farcical that Apple has been pushing the issue as far as it has. It's completely embarrassing for them, and they just should let it go," Eric Goldman – an associate professor at Santa Clara University School of Law, director of the High Tech Law Institute, well-known tech law blogger – has told The Reg."
It is interesting when an article that's supposed to cover the upcoming tablets from Amazon end up covering more the lawsuits that Apple is pursuing.
And here we have a quote from an associate professor who's opinion appears to please The Reg so much that the author forgot to find the opinion of another associate professor who's opinion is different from the "well-known tech law blogger".
Since we're discussing lawsuits I'm wondering when Amazon will engage in a lawsuit against the BIG river for the following reasons...
"AMAZON,and other Amazon.com graphics, logos, page headers, button icons, scripts, and service names are trademarks, registered trademarks or trade dress of Amazon in the U.S. and/or other countries."
It won't.
eInk is for eReaders, the refresh rate is nowhere near what you'd need for a generic tablet and nor is the range of colours.
Colour eInk will undoubtedly come on a future Kindle, Amazon have said so, its just a matter of when it reaches the right price point.
Earl Jones wrote:
Since we're discussing lawsuits I'm wondering when Amazon will engage in a lawsuit against the BIG river for the following reasons...
"AMAZON,and other Amazon.com graphics, logos, page headers, button icons, scripts, and service names are trademarks, registered trademarks or trade dress of Amazon in the U.S. and/or other countries."
------
Nope. A trademark is related to a range of services or products. It doesn't apply to something with the name but completely different. Hence the river is safe as are statuesque ladies.
So have no fear that having your wicked way with an Amazonian will require a royalty payment to a book flogger. Nope it may cost a real lot more ...
I was holding out for one of these however, my baseline is....I can type on "it," watch TV streams on "it" and I can skype my girlfriend. It mustn't get hot, mustn't be a laptop (that means work) and "it" must not be made by Apple. Girlfriend...ditto except she downloads books too. How hard can it be?
They are powerful enough to run compilers and development environments. (which is what I do..)
You can develop apps for them in c++.
You can work with the onscreen keyboard, but plug in a usb keyboard for when you want to do some real work.
It's not made by apple.
Probably you can do one or more of those already.
Meego would have done all but #1, but most tablets are capable of running an IDE at least (as long as that IDE is not Eclipse) and you can build remotely on build host on your LAN.
On C++, Actually, Android will tolerate C++ apps, and while Apple doesn't publicise it much, it's perfectly fine to write iOS apps in Objective-C++, which is standard C++ with the syntactical wrappers for objc_msgsend( ) and friends brought in from "plain" ObjC. Actually, whenever I have written for Cocoa, I've always used Objective-C++
I'd have a desktop to do the real hard work, and remote desktop in to it from the tablet. Dunno whether that's possible at the moment, I presume so, I just don't have a tablet to try it.
Although in a year or so's time the new tablet CPU's coming out might do what you want anyway.
As long as your dev tools run on Arm anyway.....
> They are powerful enough to run compilers and development environments. (which is what I do..)
NetBeans, Qt SDK, gcc good enough?
> You can develop apps for them in c++.
Qt, GTK (ok, thats C, not C++), SDL ...
>You can work with the onscreen keyboard, but plug in a usb keyboard for when you want to do some real work.
Yupp, or a mouse, or pretty much anything supported by Linux.
>Probably you can do one or more of those already.
While it does have some minor quirks, the Atom-N450 Meego based WeTab does all that.
Bloody cheap as well, less than 250€ for 16GB model, less than 350€ for the 32GB 3G model.
And who else is on your "do not buy from" list? Microsoft - utterly evil, everyone know that. Google-Android? Oh, the ones who slurp from your wi-fi, photograph without permission, are not-so-slowly adopting the same or worse approach to control as Apple? Ah, Intel, there's a wicked firm. Big, makes money, closed trade secrets, American, Ugh. Those dreadful Taiwanese, Chinese or Korean companies who cheat patent holders of their income every day? But, of course, their human rights record is first class and they are all open to a fault.
I suspect you are neither technically experienced nor strong on honest judgement or reality and are very susceptible to propaganda in all its forms, especially the nonsense that tends to predominate on the internet.
Grow up and accept that all sorts of people, including Apple, perhaps especially Apple, make excellently designed and specified kit, based on either open or closed standards (I take it you have downloaded Darwin to check the base source and you have checked the IOS developer kit and conditions yourself, not just by hearsay).
Bigoted Twit.
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"must not be made by Apple"
"It's not made by apple."
Plain irrational - so if sometime in the future Apple came out with the device that best met your needs, was the right price and did exactly what you wanted you would NOT buy it 'just' because it was sold by Apple.
That my friend(s) is called cutting off your nose to spite your face.
> Plain irrational - so if sometime in the future Apple came out with the device that best met your needs, was the right price and did exactly what you wanted you would NOT buy it 'just' because it was sold by Apple.
If you are a power user, there is really little chance of that ever happening.
Apple is Apple. They have been this way for over 20 years and if anything they are only getting WORSE rather than better. They're not very open. They don't play well with other people's data. They don't pay much attention to less casual users of any kind.
That is why I dumped my iPhone. It was a poor choice for non-trivial use of basic phone features. Trivial phone use cases were ignored and suitable mods were explicitly forbidden.
or done so and never started a terminal session, installed GNU stuff (in addition to what is all ready installed) or used MAC ports, or in fact done anything.
Now go and find a simple book about UNIX and BSD and then learn about the shell, log in to an Apple and practice. Set up a web server (well, that is a bit too easy as built in), do some programming in shell, Perl, Python, Ruby and varieties of C/C++, not forgetting to use make, awk and other tools. Configure it as a server, go on. Any missing components can be dowlnloaded from lots of sources, including Apple. Play with ssh tools. Mount a few partitions from other hosts. Install Eclipse (it's free) and start some Java or something. Now, perhaps you may be able to run up X (comes with the kit), try Apple's own development tools (rather good it is said). Document it all in troff or Latex.
Then tell us you are a power user, whatever that may be. Power boaster perhaps, Poer prejudice, Power Ignoramus.
Oh, gone back to your click-and-drag windows? Never mind.
Nice list of a lot of things you can do on an Apple workstation (I wonder why, if that's what you want to use your machine for, you pay the Apple tax for what amounts to a pretty Dell,) but all of those things are perfect examples of what you can't do on a mobile Apple device.
You can't install GNU anything, because the GPL conflicts with the Apple rules, you can't compile anything, or set up a web server, or program in shell. I'm not sure, but I bet you can't mount network volumes, or run X either.
I think what the OP wanted, as a power user, from a tablet, was the same sort of thing you enjoy doing on your workstation. That's not unreasonable. That's the reason I use an N900 (Until ATT/TMobile merge and turn off my 3G.) It's not the most amazing device, but I can and regularly do all of those things (Except run Java, natch,) and it's got a keyboard.
And just in case you're wondering: I don't use Windows or a graphical file manager, so I'd say I'm not in the click and drag camp. I still don't want much to do with any Apple kit, however, because I don't spend that much on my workstations, or servers, they can't put a real keyboard on a laptop, and they won't put any keyboards at all on their mobile devices.
I don't know about anyone else, but I do my damnedest not to pay money to the Two Great Patent Trolls of the West. I don't want to pay someone to add $5 to the price of every consumer electronic device on the planet or pay someone to try to force closed-source codecs and the like on consumers. I also don't want to pay a company which keeps fucking up my work flow every few years with new versions of software, just so that thye can charge more for re-training (Microsoft).
I'll admit to some hypocrisy in that I buy from Amazon. But hatred of Apple and Microsoft is not irrational at all.
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... but you can upload e-books from any source to your Kindle, subject to file format restrictions. Its most native format is mobi, not the more common epub, with plain text and PDF support also available, though panning and zooming on a PDF is very, very painful due to screen response times so you ideally want one formatted for A5 or smaller.
It'll confirm everything you secretly suspected about open source user interface design, but Calibre (and others I've forgotten the names of) can do conversions for you if you have any suitably non-DRMd epubs about. Project Gutenberg will give you mobi files directly, but that's generally unnecessary since Amazon seem to have grabbed them all and put them into their shop already. Though you often have to navigate thirty chancers who have opportunistically uploaded the same content with a price tag.
The Register just can't resist can it? Well knowing Amazon's past antics I'm sure you'll have plenty of similar things to to talk about from their side, things like the 1-Click "patent" which Apple had to licence from Amazon [1].
Also going by their Android appstore, if developers feel constrained by Apple's review system and policies well they're going to feel even worse, as Amazon takes longer to review and feels free to price you app however they please - among other issues described by Apparatus's developer. [2]
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1017-245879.html
http://bithack.se/news/apparatus-amazon-july-4-2011.html
Amazon is one of the few very big companies that I've had no issues with at all.
Their stuff is well priced, delivery free or fast. Problems I've had have all been sorted out quickly without argument, I do stick with Amazon as the seller rather than the linked Ebay style sellers.
I've a Kindle and it works really well.
I'll be interested to see if their tablet offering keeps up the good work.
Never had a problem with Amazon either, and I do like my Kindle too (and as I have said before, I have never purchased a ebook - all free so far)
They are a prime example of good customer service, good pricing and good product.
I'm sure others will have had opposite experiences though.
Never had any problems with Amazon.
Their customer service is pretty supreme as well.
When my gf accidentally stood on her Kindle they delivered a new one next day, then a couple of days later they delivered a box & return label to send back the old one.
Once she'd set up the new kindle it downloaded all the books she'd purchased on the last one.
Brilliant...
If the rumours are true and it is an 8 incher they are planning (assumption "widescreen") then the external dimensions of the tab will be almost identical with the current Kindle and in portrait mode very close to the current Kindle's screen width. Given that the 10 inch form-factor is the main favourite in the market *at the moment* it will be interesting to see what effect Amazon's effort has on public perceptions of which is the most useful/desirable form-factor.
Agreed. In fact if the offering is popular there will no doubt be a number of good custom roms sporting 3.2 available. It will be interesting to see whether it ships with a locked boot-loader or not. I'm guessing that it will, although why they bother I do not know given that someone will work out how to prise it open.
I was thinking that I might be tempted by the Amazon tablet until I read mention of a colour e-Ink Kindle. Even if it's little more than vapourware at present, I will still sit on my meagre collection of pennies and wait for such a delight. I so love my Kindle that I'm happy to stick with a dedicated e-reader that (basically) does one thing and does it well, until another one comes out that does the same one thing, but does it better.
>accept that all sorts of people, including Apple, perhaps especially Apple, make excellently designed and specified kit,<
I despise Apple with an unreasoning hatred bordering on psychopathic, but I loves my jailbreaked iPad :-). Still, can't wait to see what amazon release, and at what price point.
Now that could get me to switch from my Sony 650 Reader - which although lovely tech is hobbled by its need to be tethered to the Waterstone's eBook store. It pains me to say it, but Kindle with touchscreen would be pretty much perfect...
...until the next big thing comes along.
Speaking of which, whatever happened to Mirasol screens? Shouldn't they be out by now?
Can you explain the "...hobbled by its need to be tethered to the Waterstone's eBook store" comment?
I was thinking of getting one of these, as I quite liked it in the store. I considered self-importing the 950 model because I would prefer a larger screen.
Anyway, what is the hobbling all about?
Dweeb
Symbian developers can (could? probably none of us left) build programs as .app executables. Thus the notion that Apple can possibly "own" the idea of an application being an "app" is nonsense. It was common usage amongst developers. The stable door is wide open on this one.
Having given them a heads up, I'm waiting for the fruit-themed lawyers to swoop on the cooling carcass that was Symbian, to purge it of the unlicenced, unapproved, unholy and gosh darned unamerican use of ".app".
Did I say unamerican? Apologies to all those nations in North and South America that aren't the US of A.
Apple is a laughing stock amongst developers immune to the reality distortion field. Probably.
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