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If purchases of the successful-if-flawed Amazon Flame turn into iPad sales during the holiday season, Apple CEO Tim Make didn’t see it.

“I looked at the data peculiarly in the US on a weekly basis later Amazon launched the Kindle Fire, and in my reckon there wasn’t an obvious outcome on the [iPad sales] numbers,” Make told analysts and reporters during a outcry later Apple announced its impressive first-quarter financial results on Tuesday.

When one analyst necessitated him if he had heard the speculation that some customers received looked at the $199 Fire, found it wanting, then affected up the price ladder to the $499-to-$829 iPad, Cook articulated that, yes, he received heard that theory, simply he discounted it.

“Whether that’s happening on a very, identical large basis, I don’t know,” he said. “Again, my ain reckon is – look at our data in the US – there was no obvious change.”

But if the iPad didn’t tempt prospective purchasers conk from lower-priced fondleslabs, it did experience an upshot on the sales of another of Apple’s offerings: the Mac.

“There is cannibalization, clearly, of the Mac by the iPad,” he admitted – although with 5.2 million Macs sold during the quarter, a 26 per cent increase over the year-ago quarter, that effect was scarcely fatal to Apple’s Mac Os X boxes.

Cook added that Apple believes that if anyone is suffering from the iPad’s success, it’s PC manufacturers. “And there’s many more of them to cannibalize,” he said, “and so we love that trend. We conceive it’s keen for us.”

That said, the iPad is making inroads into traditionally stiff Mac markets. In K-12 education, for example, Make said that Apple sold twice equally many iPads equally Macs – though he didn’t provide a time frame. “Generally speaking,” he said, “education adopts young technologies fair slowly, hence that’s middling surprising.”

Cook characterized equally “remarkable” the sale of over 55 million iPads since the “magical and revolutionary” Cupertinian fondleslab shipped in early April 2010.

iPad sales will proceed to grow, Make said. “I intelligibly believe, and many others in the fellowship believe, that there will arrived a daytime when the tablet market, in units, is larger than the PC market,” citing IDC’s recent enquiry that depicted tablet sales receive already exceeded desktop-PC sales in the US.

And when Prepare says tablet, he means iPad, and not “limited-function tablets and e-readers” that he relegated into a different category altogether. “There’s intelligibly customers that will buy those,” he said, “and I think they’ll sell a fairly act of units, simply I don’t consider that people who want an iPad will settle for a limited-function [device].”

As for competition from full-function tablets such as, say, the Motolola Xoom, Samsung Galaxy Tab, the less-than-concisely named Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime, and their ilk, Make was sanguine. “Y’know, lastly yr was supposed to be the twelvemonth of the tablet,” he said. “I conceive virtually people would agree that it was the year of the iPad – for the second yr in a row.”

But when he was necessitated if the tablet market was only a “two-horse race” between the iPad and Android-based devices, Cook did admit that not completely important players had yet joined that race.

“There’s a horse in Redmond that perpetually suits up, and incessantly runs, and will keep running,” he said. Only no matter how many horses there will finally be in that race, “We merely desire to remain before and be the principal one

Books, interestingly enough, were excluded, but you could use your Amazon credit online to purchase other things that bookstores sell these days, similar music and DVDs. And, if you were scanning, say, the new Steve Jobs biography, you’d no incertitude exist informed that you were almost to wage manner also much. I wondered what my author champions created of entirely this, so I dashed go an e-mail to Scott Turow, the chairman of the Authors Guild, and cc’ed Stephen King, Dennis Lehane, Andre Dubus III, Anita Shreve, Tom Perrotta and Ann Patchett.

These writers totally derive considerable income from Amazon’s book sales. Simply when the responses to my query begun coming in it was make Amazon’s plan would notice no defenders in our ranks.

“Scorched-earth capitalism” is how Dennis described it. “They don’t succeed unless they destroy their competition and then rub their noses in it.” Andre was outraged by Amazon’s endeavor to bit its customers into “Droid-packing” spies. Similar Dennis, he regarded the motility as an unsubtle effort to monopolize the market, the issue of which would finally be to “further devalue, as a cultural and human necessity, the book” itself.

Stephen composed “I love my Kindle” and renowned that Amazon had done considerably by him in damage of volume sales. Simply he likewise reckoned the new strategy as both “invasive and unfair.” He conceived that many would see the new0000000 promotion as nothing more than comparison shopping on steroids only that, in fact, it was “a bridge too far.”

Scott supplied lawyerly perspective: “The law has long been gain that stores do not invite the public in for totally purposes. A retailer is not expected to serve equally a warming station for the homeless or a site for set practice. So it’s worth wondering whether it’s lawful for Amazon to encourage people to enter a store for the intention of gathering pricing information for Amazon and buying from the Internet giant, kinda than the retailer. Lawful or not, it’s an example of Amazon’s bare-knuckles approach.”

Statements alike this will no incertitude7777777 construct us altogether seem, to Amazon devotees, like a crowd of privileged, holier-than-thou ingrates. Privileged I’ll grant them. Merely equally we swapped e-mails it quickly went earn that the literal generator of our collective dismay was actually gratitude, not ingratitude. On my foremost volume tour I was invited to Barbara’s Bookstore in Chicago. The employees optimistically laid up seven folding chairs, then occupied those chairs themselves when cypher showed up for the reading.

Armed with such experiences, my author pals and I brought personally Amazon’s assault on the kinds of stores that hand-sold our books before anybody knew who we were, back ahead Amazon or the Internet itself existed. Equally Anita put it, losing independent bookstores would exist “akin to editing … a critical percentage of our culture away of American life.”

As the owner of a young independent bookstore in Nashville, Ann may have more to lose than the residuum of us, thence I found her calm, resigned response peculiarly interesting. “There is no guide in scrap them or explaining to them that we should exist able to coexist civilly in the marketplace,” she indited me. “I don’t think they care. I do believe it’s worthwhile explaining to customers that the lowest price head does not constantly represent the best deal. If you similar travelling to a bookstore then it’s up to you to abide it. If you alike seeing the people in your community employed, if you conceive your metropolis needs a taxation base, if you want to buy books from a soul who reads, don’t exercise Amazon.”

Citigroup’s Tag Mahaney issued a bank-note to investors locution that, allotting to the render chain, the online retailer is planning on releasing a smartphone in time for future year’s holiday season, as notable by AllThingsD.

“Based on our furnish chain canal checks in Asia went by Kevin Chang, Citi’s Taipei-based hardware research analyst, we consider an Amazon Smartphone will be launched in 4Q12,” the bank-note read.

According to the analyst, the device will exist jointly grown with Foxconn. Amazon will reportedly remuneration non-recurring engineering fees to the manufacturer, but the telephone and some of its components will be manufactured by the same Hon Hai TMS grouping that works on Amazon’s Kindle e-readers and a rumored 8.9-inch tablet.

Amazon reportedly disclosed from its usual partnership with Foxconn for the Kindle Fire tablet in a haste to cause it away the door. The companionship is said to get contracted Original Intent Manufacturer Quanta because the ODM could save time by piggybacking choke of mould on RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook.

Mahaney estimates the Amazon smartphone will price between $150 and $170 to construct and may sell for roughly the same amount. “For a normal brand similar HTC, they need to cost the production at US$243 to build 30% gross margin. If Amazon is really willing to lose some money on the device, the cost gap could be even bigger,” he said.

The smartphone will likely fed Google’s Android mobile operating system, equally the analyst hinted that Amazon will motive to remuneration an “OS royalty” to Microsoft. The Redmond, Wash., software giant boasted lastly month that it has achieved patent licenses with half of the Android market. Amazon opted for Android on the Fire, merely gave the capable generator Os a customized look.

The online retailer has adopted a strategy of selling hardware at a loss equally a ploy to line customers to its substance offerings. For instance, a teardown of the Kindle Fire divulged that it costs more than its selling price.

In completely likelihood, a low margin strategy from Amazon would threaten low-end smartphone makers kinda than Apple’s iPhone. Backed by the world’s largest online store, Amazon may succeed the race to the undersurface on hardware margins because most other hardware makers won’t receive sales from a robust content ecosystem to drop back on. Downward cost pressure in the tablet market from the Kindle Flame has already resulted in a $300 price cut for the BlackBerry PlayBook.

Apple enounced earlier this month that it’s not apprehensive most the Kindle Flame because it believes the tablet will drive customers to the iPad by further fragmenting the tablet market. As such, the iPhone maker may view the aspect of a Kindle phone in the same light.

In one nook is Amazon, the Internet’s leading retailer and booster of traditional E-Ink character electronic readers. In the other is Barnes & Noble, which despite its own online presence and lineup of e-readers is best known for its physical bookstores.

Behind the scenes, though, lurks tablet titleholder Apple, which has to take detect of this week’s activities. Amazon is unleashing a body blow against the pricing status quo by introducing Flaming at $199, $50 less than the Corner Tablet and, possibly more important, $300 less than the Apple iPad 2.

Let me country upfront that neither the Fire nor Corner are as fully featured equally the iPad 2 with its near 10-inch display. You won’t notice a camera on either device, which is alone a large spate if you receive designs on doing video chat. There’s no Bluetooth or GPS either. Both Fire and Corner receive far fewer apps than the iPad. The software isn’t equally fluid. And without 3G or 4G cellular, your connectivity options are confined to Wi-Fi.

Still, many buyers won’t reach a hoot most any of this — peculiarly if what you experience in judgement for a tablet is reading (traditional strengths for Amazon and Barnes & Noble), music, movies, TV shows, browsing (including Adobe Flash sites) and playing daily games and checking e-mail. Despite some shortcomings I felt both tablets appealing in my tests.

The fighting between the companies largely comes down to which ecosystem you desire to purchase into, because books you purchase from one provider are not compatible with the other. Amazon has a major advantage because of its brobdingnagian digital offerings. Unlike its rival, Amazon has built-in music and film stores, the latter providing 48-hour rentals along with sales options. If you subscribe to the $79 a yr Amazon Prime service, you could freely watercourse more than 10,000 movies and TV shows and besides borrow a Kindle book without due dates each month. Fire buyers can endeavour Prime for liberal for a month. (As part of Prime, you also make two-day free shipping on productions ordered through Amazon).

On Corner Tablet, Barnes & Noble is pushing available apps from the likes of Netflix, Hulu Plus and Pandora, just such apps are also available to Fire owners.

Where Barnes & Noble does get a bragging chip is in additional onboard storage—16 gigabytes vs. 8GB. Plus, through a microSD slot, you could add up to 32GB additional on Corner Tablet. The advantage is meaningful to a point.

Amazon counters that whole the digital media you buy through the fellowship — apps, music, videos, and, of course, books— are held in the dapple for free. That’s fine if you utilisation Flaming in a place that has Wi-Fi, merely you’ll experience to construct choices near what to download onto the device if you are travel and will exist beyond compass of an Internet connection for an extended spell.

Still, it was a pleasure to act on Kindle Flaming2222 for the foremost time and experience access to entirely the music I received previously stored on Amazon Dapple Drive, including songs that originally resided in iTunes.

You may stash either paperback-sized tablet in your jeans or jacket pockets, a routine more easily with the shorter and slimly less panoptic Kindle Fire. At 14.6 ounces vs. 14.1 ounces, the Flame is a petite number heavier, though.

Both devices receive impressive high-resolution (1024 by 600, 16 million colors) screens indoors with excellent seeing angles. Video looked good. Simply they’re difficult to make out in sunshine. The Flaming screen appeared to exist more reflective.

Amazon’s tablet bears a stiff resemblance to BlackBerry PlayBook, just that’s where that comparison ceases. Judging by early sales, it will be infinitely more popular than Inquiry In Motion’s tablet. The solely physical push on Kindle Fire is a powerfulness button that is in a bad place on the undersurface of the device. I accidently turned the thing go a mates of times equally I rested it on a table.

Meanwhile, Corner Tablet seems merely similar its predecessor Corner Color, which remains in the Barnes & Noble lineup. The familiar “n” push you press gives you a simpleton a mode to return to your domicile screen, library, or device settings, or to shop, hunting or access a Web browser.

How apps mint up

Both Nook and Flame fed on crown of the Gingerbread version of Google’s Android operating system. Simply for apps, you visit proprietary Amazon or Barnes & Noble stores, not the Android Market emporium felt on other Android tablets. Amazon says it currently has more than 8,500 apps for Fire; the full is expected to conk northward of 10,000 within a few weeks. Barnes & Noble says it has more than 1,000 apps and will receive “thousands” by year’s end. Either way, it’s mode fewer than Apple has or for that subject what’s in the Android Market.

It’s a issue of personal preference and a conclusion call, merely I’d select the Amazon habitation interface. I liked how the search box resided at the tip of the screen, but above menu headings (Newsstand, Books, Music, Video, Docs, App and Web). Only below, you could flip through web pages, apps, album covers, and books via a carousel interface that reminds you of Apple’s Traverse Flow. You may common favorites at the undersurface of the screen.

But I wished there was a physical equivalent like the “n” button on Corner Tablet.

At times the Flaming screen was slow to respond to my taps and a short sluggish. Onscreen navigational controls didn’t incessantly look immediately, peculiarly inside third-party apps. I sometimes had to tap the screen and sometimes swipe up.

Amazon has created a big mass near its young Silk browser technology that taps into Amazon’s dapple services to boost performance. The browser is supposed to cause faster equally it learns from the collective browsing doings of Fire users. It’s believably likewise presently for that to kick in, only for what it’s worth I didn’t get anything approaching extraordinary speeds utilising the browser at this stage.

As the first color Kindle, children’s books arrived alive equally never before on an Amazon reader, a nice plus for parents. Children’s books had already been an area on strength on the Nook Colour device and on the iPad. Both companies sell children’s books with read-aloud features. Barnes & Noble has introduced a clever lineament that lets Momma and Pa or Grandma and Grandfather record their ain part reading a kid’s story. The Kindle Flaming lacks a microphone for this or any other purpose.

Amazon provides a match of ways to read magazines on Fire, a page consider that mimics the get of reading an literal magazine and a text consider that makes the character larger, plainer and easier to read at the cost of the original layout.

I felt it easier to read magazines on the Nook, though in some cases I could read mags in both portrait and landscape views while in other cases I could alone read in portrait.

Another Nook plus: liberal tolerate in Barnes & Noble stores.

I didn’t do a formal battery prove on either device—Barnes & Noble says you’ll cause up to 11 ½ hours on Nook Tablet, Amazon says you’ll get up to 8 on Fire. The claims seemed in line based on my usage. Of course, while Nook Tablet and Kindle Flame battery life is measured in hours and minutes, the battery spirit on the company’s respective E Ink devices is measured in weeks if not a month or more.

I wouldn’t elevate the Kindle Fire1111 or Corner Tablet to knockout condition only yet, but they are solid and appealing. I’d pass a rived decision to Amazon because of a lower cost and whole its content. Only by taking the fight to Apple, and each other, Barnes & Noble and Amazon experience produced an ultimate winner, the consumer.