Amazon launched their Kindle Fire tablet yesterday and one feature that was unveiled was its Silk browser, but I'll talk about that in a bit. What is interesting from an overall perspective is that this new Amazon tablet isn't really being sold as a piece of technology, it's really being sold as an access device to the services that Amazon offers - ebooks, music, cloud storage, etc. In fact as a bit of technology the Kindle Fire is quite underwhelming, it's based on the same hardware design as the Blackberry PlayBook, which has already bombed. The Kindle Fire is cheap though at $199. Amazon is offering a device to people who can't decide between a Kindle and an iPad - they want eBooks, but they also want to browse the web, and stream movies and TV and play games. Amazon offers all these services via the Fire. You could argue that people don't buy an iPad for its hardware specification - they want iBooks, iTunes, and access to thousands of Apps, which is what Apple provides them. The iPod was successful not because it was functionally better than other MP3 players but because it was seamlessly integrated with iTunes, an easy way to manage your digital music collection and the biggest online music store on the planet. If the Kindle Fire is a success, and I think at $199 it will be a popular Christmas gift, then this really is a nail in the coffin of many technology companies. In the post-PC world consumer want services not technology. Apple realised this a decade ago with iTunes and Amazon has woken up to this. HP has abandoned the PC market already - Samsung, Dell, LG, Sony, etc...you'll not survive if you just try to sell us hardware.
Which brings me back to Amazon's Silk browser - very clever. This is moving the time and processing effort of rendering a web page from the mobile device to Amazon's EC2 cloud computing service. This will mean simply that web pages should appear much faster on the Kindle Fire than other tablets. It will be interesting to see if Google follows suit with Chrome and Apple with Safari. The video below explains how Silk works and what makes it different to other browsers.
I read this article at Slate.com over lunch today. I agree with the author's view that our devices will soon become so connected to the cloud that we'll cease to worry about their onboard processing power or storage capacity and I bloggged about this last year and the side effect it would have on reducing piracy. Farhad Manjoo is of course quite correct though to point out that this future is totally dependent on the network and mobile broadband speeds. He complains about the poor speeds in the US, he should try NZ, we dream about the sort of connectivity they have in the US. There's not much point in having everything in the cloud if you can't access it everywhere.
There are lots of articles around at the moment about what the next version of the iPad may look like. There's no doubt that Apple stole such a lead on its competitors that almost a year later few strong competitors to the iPad exist, so a next-gen version may increase Apple's dominance of this sector. This is also I suppose of interest to people thinking of an iPad as a Christmas purchase - should they hold-off and wait for the new version.
However, I think most of the commentators are totally missing the point (here's a typical iPad 2.0 article). We all know what the new version of the iPad will be (broadly speaking), but the hardware is much less than half the story. So let's get the iPad 2.0 out of the way:
it will have a front facing camera to support FaceTime (if you look carefully at the top centre of your iPad you'll see a small hole already exists for a camera),
it wont have a back facing camera (everyone who has an iPad probably has a digital camera already),
it will be the same size, but perhaps lighter and with even better battery life,
there will not be a 7" screen version
it may have a faster processor and more RAM
it will not have a retina display (there's not enough processing power in the iPad for that many pixels on a 10" screen)
it will not have more than 64GB storage
it will run iOS 5.0
Really all the hardware points are just obvious. But the last two items need explanation. The iPad will not need more that 64GB of storage because iOS 5.0 will be seamlessly integrated with Apple's cloud services (iTunes-in-the-cloud and other cloud storage systems).
My prediction is that with iOS 5.0 users of iOS devices will store and access all their music, photos, movies, TV shows, podcasts, ebooks, and data files in the cloud. The local storage on your devices will just be used as a local cache for frequently and recently used data. Your entire music library and everything else will permanently live on Apple's cloud. Hence you'll never need more than 64GB or local storage.
Apple are about to open their massive data center in North Carolina and all the smart money is that this will be used for iTunes-in-the-cloud. So basically stop worrying about the iPad 2.0, the really interesting innovations will be iOS 5.0 and iTunes.
