Amazon’s new Fire HD tablets challenge across the market

To date most tablet manufacturers have had two main routes: price it high and take on Apple, or price it low and take on the Android-dominated bargain market. With a flurry of announcements this week, Amazon is clearly going for both.

The existing seven inch Kindle Fire is getting a price cut from $199 to $160. The significance there is that it’s now significantly undercutting Google’s Nexus 7 and is thus the cheapest option for people who want a trusted brand name tablet rather than risk cutting corners on performance of usability.


Meanwhile there’s a new range of “HD” Fires with a bunch of new features beyond higher screen resolution such as a “drastically” improved processor, better wireless reception a camera, Kindle style syncing between e-Books and their audio versions, and an “X-Ray” feature that recognizes actors in a video and provides relevant links to sources such as IMDB. As is often the case with tablets, it may be a very personal decision as to which features really make a difference.

The 7 inch HD is at the familiar $199 price point, with a new 8.9 inch version at an iPad-busting $399, both models having 16GB of storage. There’s also a $499 model that has 32GB and supports LTE 4G speeds.

To top that off, Amazon is offering an LTE data plan for just $50 a year. That led Amazon boss Jeff Bozos to boast that the tablet/data plan combination will save $400 in the first year compared to an iPad.

However, the Amazon data plan is only for 250 MB a month. If you are getting, for example, 10Mbps on LTE you’ll be enjoying those fast speeds for all of three and a half minutes each month. Put another way, you’re effectively paying more than $70 an hour for the high-speed access.

Bezos didn’t directly address whether any of these devices are being sold at break-even or even below cost price. (It’s almost impossible to believe the reduced-price original Fire isn’t a loss-leader.) However, he did hint at such economics by pointing out that “we want to make money when people use our devices, not when they buy are devices.”

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Pogoplug partners with Amazon to offer affordable cloud storage family plans

Pogoplug is pairing up with Amazon to offer not only its own storage devices but also online archival storage. That means that your information will be accessible even if your hard drive dies, gets a nasty virus, or you just upgrade your computer. They are also offering family plans that come with a free Pogoplug device to get you started.

According to Engadget, the partnership between Amazon and Pogoplug is expected to be part of Amazon’s conference this afternoon. Pogoplug is offering three different family plan tiers all of which come with one of their devices. The lowest yearly plan is a $29.99 plan that gives three family members unlimited onsite cloud storage and 100 GB of offsite cloud storage. The $49.99 per year plan bumps up the onsite storage 300 GB offsite cloud storage and gives five users all of the different storage options. Ninety nine dollars a year will give seven family members a full Terrabyte of offsite cloud storage as well as unlimited onsite cloud storage.


The offsite cloud storage will use Amazon Glacier. This unique cloud storage service normally costs one cent per gigabyte per month to store information. There are no up front costs and you only pay for what you store. With Pogoplug, you are paying the yearly fee for a certain amount of offsite storage whether you use it all or not. You are also paying for more family members to access the service as you purchase larger storage plans.

The reason why you can get the Amazon service so cheap (300 GB would cost $3.00) is because you pay for it on the backside when you go to download. First your download request is sent to a queue and and according to Engadget won’t be available to download for three to five hours and it is only available to download for 24 hours. The first five percent of the download is free. After that you pay one cent per additional gigabyte you download. You don’t have to worry about any download cost because it is included in your plan.

You don’t have to use the Amazon Offsite storage option if you don’t want to. Pogoplug has its own storage system and it has much quicker access and download times than what you get with Amazon Glacier. The offsite storage option is there as a backup backup option (no that is not a stutter). For those that want to make sure that their most precious pictures or documents are safe, you can have your own redundant backup system.

For large families with multiple devices, this may be just the type of service you could use. Once you have your device set up, you can access the content with any browser or with apps on your iOS devices or Android devices. As families accumulate multiple computers, smartphones and tablets, having an easy to use and easy to access storage system becomes essential. Check it out and see if it is something your family could use.

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Web giants form Internet Assocation lobby group

Four of the most prominent websites are among those forming a new lobbying group to promote Internet forms. Amazon, eBay, Facebook and Google are the first known members of the Internet Association.

The public face of the group is Michael Beckerman, who comes with connections. He was previously an advisor to Fred Upton, the congressman in charge of the committee that deals with the Internet among other issues.


Officially the idea of the group is to have a more united and consistent voice when lobbying for Internet firms, with a principle of promoting ” public policy solutions that strengthen and protect an open, innovative and free Internet.” Unofficially it may also be an attempt to cut costs or spend cash more wisely by avoiding the need for two firms to lobby hard on the same argument.

Beckerman says a full list of the Internet Association’s members and policies will be ready for September. At that point it appears the lobbyists will turn their attention to electoral candidates including potential congressmen.

All four firms known to have joined have increased their lobbying spending recently, with year-on-year rises between 10 percent (eBay) and 90 percent (Google), with a total spend of just under six million dollars between April and June.

It’s certainly true that the clout of these major firms may well lobby for measures that will be welcomed by many web users. For example, Beckerman has already indicated that such a group would have been better placed to fight proposed legislation such as the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act. The firms could also take on cable companies and other internet providers that want to limit net neutrality.

On the other hand, until we see a full list of members, it’s hard to know how representative this will be of the web as a whole. There’s a danger it could simply be a big boys club that becomes preoccupied with staving off any antitrust measures that stop major firms abusing their market position at the expense of smaller challengers.

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Amazon smartphone on way, probably



It looks as though Amazon is developing its own smartphone alongside Foxconn, the Chinese company that

currently manufactures the iPhone for Apple.

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