Episode: 835
Title: HPR0835: Amazon sets the world on Fire
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0835/hpr0835.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 03:15:07

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GAEDNA
Jarrier
Gin
流
Harja
Jarrier
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Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, this is Mr. Gadgets, and I thought I would
continue the discussion that I kind of began with the white Android tablet suck, and continue
this one because I am at the cusp, I am between the mobile revolution tier that are shaking
the very pillars of the mobile world, i.e. just last week, Amazon announced the Amazon
Fire and the world is on fire, right? The Amazon Fire, the Kindle Fire, so it's their 4a,
sorry, their 4a, into their 4a, which is selling you off over their devices, specifically
stuff that you can consume via the device. So obviously the Kindle readers are probably
a little argument with the given to the fact that the Kindle readers are probably the most
popular reader, and kind of revolutionize that whole reader space. There were lots of Sony readers,
back to, I bought some of those first Christopher Friends own them, things like that, and there are
plenty of Sony readers that were around, other kinds of digital readers that were around,
before the Kindle came along, but the Kindle kind of really set a standard for those kinds of
things that changed things around, quite a bit in that kind of space, especially with the
going beyond just the Wi-Fi connection, and having that 3G, so you can order the book right there,
and get it 3G delivered to your device directly, plus that, you know, same as all the other
users who have that e-ink, so it's very easy to read. Various types of devices, you don't
long away, and they came out with the Wi-Fi only ones, and they come out with the more recent ones
that are just the, you know, ones that have advertisements that they're really not that inclusive,
I guess, from what people say. It's just that advertising that flashes on the screen when it's
in its screen saber mode, if you will, for things that are on the page that's never
interesting, but you're actually being looked. Okay, so now take that and mix that up with the idea
that you want a color screen that won't be as readable outside, and maybe arguably less readable
overall, but it will allow you to have the full color kinds of things, so you want a full color
kind of catalog, or comic books, if you will, full color magazine, sorry, getting over cold here.
Well, you know, you can do that, just like those Android tablets, just like the iPad,
and have all of that kind of give this there, plus you have all the stuff that you are using on Amazon,
and it will be straight here on your Kindle, and so they're really hoping that this is going to
make big splash, and really get you to, of course, buy more stuff from them. And this is obvious,
but then again, let's keep in mind, all right, I'm going to, I'm going to set aside the whole thing
about the openness of cloud and the openness of things online, and all those kinds of things,
all those kinds of arguments, okay. Ever since we've been interacting with the internet,
and people have started offering us free services, it's always been the cost. They're still going
to make money, and it isn't from, you know, well, it's from our attention. They have our attention,
and they sell things through that attention that they get from us, okay.
You're paying for it one way or another.
So with Amazon at least so far, the attention that they want from these devices that you buy
from them is relatively small for the cheaper price that they would give you with the, with offers.
There wasn't any mention in the last week's press conference about whether there's going to be
options for these new models that came out with some really nice new models of their e-paper
versions of things, as well as the Kindle fire, the color one. As you might guess, I'm extremely
interested in the Kindle fire, because it's my seven inch form factor, which I really want
for my media consumption device. I want to read my book, and even my magazine will be fine,
about a 70's template. I have attempted this and proven this to myself, and it's more than
adequate for some checking my e-mail and, you know, all those kinds of things also. Some of the
negatives that people have brought up about this particular model are, and I read an all-touch
tablet article on this, and some of the things that he brought up, and other people online have
been bringing this up to a couple of other reviews of what was talked about in the session last week.
No camera. Now, I'm not sure with tablets that no camera is really that much of an issue.
Perhaps let's go with a seven inch tablet, as opposed to a 10 inch tablet being heavier.
I'm not sure how much taking your pictures with your tablet you're going to do. This was a caveat
of one guy who I saw who had a brand new HD touchpad, which I think he had actually won at the
Linux, the Ohio Linux, that's when I was there, and they were giving me a couple of the HD touch
pads there, and I think maybe he had a brand new fresh HD touchpad, and while he was listening to
DualCore, he was actually holding the touchpad up and videoing as they were playing. But I imagine
the virus were getting pretty tired after a while. Not that everybody's hard working in time
from, you know, just bunching and stuff, and dancing around and having a good time, but
I'm not sure that that's that practical. It's not your phone, your phone, you take a picture,
and it's about the same size as your camera would be if you had a little contact camera, and
I don't know. But admittedly, I'm a still camera guy, but I'm not a movie camera guy. I'm not a
video person. I'm not a videographer. I'm a photographer. And I don't know whether that's something
happened to do with my generation, but that was the visual media that I learned, and that's where
I'm sticking with, but the videography is as much of an interest to me. I'm really not sure how much
a forward-facing camera, you know, I think that's what it's called. Anyway, the one that you could
take a picture, you could use a screen of the tablet and take a picture or something that's
the front of you, using it as a camera that way. I'm not sure how practical that really is.
Give me some feedback, or even better yet, Ken would love you to call in a show and talk about
how you would use a tablet or how you do use your tablet, okay? The second thing is not having
a tablet that's facing towards you, okay? Whatever that is, forward-facing, backward-facing.
The camera is essentially a webcam. Now that could be useful at a tablet I would think,
because if you're sitting in the coffee shop and you want to do a little Google Hangout,
you'd have a little camera on there, and I suppose that could be adventurous. But you know,
that's not my 7-inch tablet necessarily kind of thing. I don't know. I suppose I can miss that.
I suppose it could be nice to have that. And there's something that says that maybe sometime
later on that might be added in, or some kind of a dongle that you could put, you know,
put onto it, because I'm pretty sure I believe I remember this thing at a USB,
many USB, I think, maybe micro USB. So maybe somebody will come up with a, you know,
a plug-out, a plugable camera to add that to it for a little webcam.
I've done the Google Plus Hangout a couple times, and you know, it's kind of interesting,
and I guess if I had that, I might use it with that purpose on occasion.
But it's not going to be a big loss, because I own 27-inch tablets that did have, you know,
camera's on them, and I really didn't miss the camera. That's my own personal preference,
that's my own personal usage. You were vitally sugary, not bellowed in all states,
standard disc labor. So the thing that interests me about this, the other thing that he said,
though, was the fact that it did not have, let's see, what was it, didn't have the camera,
right? And also that it, oh no, what was it now? I'm sorry, I'm blanking. That's the first time I
could remember having totally blanked on this stream of consciousness kind of things, but
sometimes the stream kind of gets damned up a little bit by rocking it, kind of hops over.
So it doesn't have the camera, but I'm not sure I would really miss the camera all that much.
You might, okay? But the other thing about it is it does not have a microSD slot the way a lot
of these things do, but it has the cloud built into it. Now another, I see as a positive about it,
is this new browser. Not admittedly, yes, they're, you know, they're going to be having your
info of what you're browsing up there on their EC2 stories. They're Amazon, you know, back in
that's going to basically take what you're browsing and compress it down or pre-render it or
something like that, they were saying. Anyway, somehow they're going to make that browsing faster
to your local device because your EC2 and back in on the Amazon is going to be lots of big old
graphic engine for your website. Now, I know, yeah, they're checking everything, but they're
already tracking everything you do in everywhere they possibly can, okay? And they're going to sell
you stuff. So it doesn't really matter that much as it's Google tracking everything that you do,
and they're sending you ads that are most likely Amazon ads or that Amazon is tracking you.
Maybe it's a little more efficient tracking. What it is you're looking at? I guess if it really
started showing you ads and stuff I was interested in, they're tracking me anyway and they're showing
me a pinch of ads I don't care about. Maybe if you think you do a little bit more,
teach show me ads that I was interested in. Who does? But if it makes it faster, I can ignore ads.
I can ignore ads all day. I ignore ads just out the wazoo, okay? I ignore ads on such a regular
basis. It almost abases me. I went on a trip, I mentioned off and on, that my daughter is a
grad student up in the zoolomontana. A couple of years ago when we were going on the trip up to
the zoolomontana to find a place for her to live while she was up there in grad school, I took along
a little debt book that I had, and I had done a fresh install onto that netbook of whatever was
the litokloss using at the particular time, and whatever that particular one was that I was using,
did not have flash as a default, and I did not, I purposely did not install flash, even though
it was pretty easy to do post install. And I wanted to experience what was it like to have a non-flash
right of a device? Like an iPad, right? Can't run flash on the iPad. I wanted to actually experience
the internet without flash. And invariably, I lost out on almost no content I was actually
interested in, but what I did notice was how many ads were over there at the edge that it could
show me because they were at flash. And normally I got really good at just ignoring those. They're
on the peripheral of my vision, and they don't even get, you know, my eyes attention.
Maybe subliminally, there's like a little ghost image of the ad over there that's subliminally
kidding to my subcops. Ooh, that's a terrible idea. Maybe advertisers will start figuring out how to
get the ads that you don't pay any attention to, to somehow flash or something, and get into your
subconscious so you want to buy the product anyway, you don't look at them. That's a bad technology.
Nobody take that idea to run with it. Nobody's built that technology, okay? So,
what I didn't see was all the bunch of ads, and I started noticing them because I got the little
you can't play this because you don't have flash. Don't you want to, you know, load flash? Well,
no, because I don't want to see any seven ads that are along the side.
Now, because that's not going to happen with this thing, I think this thing does play flash,
right? That's one of the advantages of Android over iOS play flash.
One of the other advantages, I know the other one he said was that it was not using the Android
App Store. Now, I already explained to you that there's something going on with the Android App Store
because, you know, that's why Android tab was suck. It's because you can't just get the Android
App Store on any version of Android. You've got to have the blush version of Android,
and if you don't have the Android App Store, it doesn't mean you can just
sideload an APK on there because the APK isn't available because all they have is a QR code,
orally, to take you to the Android App Store. So, not having the Android App Store, but having
a App Store from Amazon that works. Yes, right now, there are not as many Android apps on the
Amazon Android App Store as there are on the actual Android App Store. But,
if this is as successful as I think it will be, this is almost going to take over as the app store
you want to be on, or at least it will be as important to be on as the Android App Store for phones
that this will be the place to be for your tablet app, and the Android App Store is going to end up
being the place to be for your phone size app. I can almost see that kind of dichotomy happening here
if this is as successful as it is. I think it's going to be because at 200 bucks, folks, 200 bucks,
they have that magic price point. 200 bucks is they killed off everybody else that's going to do
a tablet. Your tablet has to be remarkably better than this to get anywhere near any more money than
this. I mean, you're going to have to show me that you're way better than this thing is at 200 bucks
to even get 300 bucks out of me for your quote unquote real Android tablet.
And the Chinese guys that have been making hay at doing the sub 200, hey, they're gone, right?
That whole business has left, left the building, okay? So,
I'm thinking, obviously, from how I'm enthusiastic about it, that this thing has a real chance,
but it has a chance only if, beyond the, I mean, I'm probably going to buy one, and it's probably
going to be around with me all the time, you know, because it's a seven inch tablet, and it can
be with me easier all the time than anything bigger than that. But I called into an iOS oriented
show, Mac OS Kim, and I made a comment to him when they were having discussion about this,
and I said, the true success of this is going to be the execution in terms of how, okay? They have
the what? They have the ecosystem. They have the media that you want to see on this device,
and they own all of it. Now, the reason why I think this is going to be successful and
more successful than it, but he also has been with the Nander Tesla so far, is because they're
competing to tackle on their own terms, and in the way that everybody from the open side of things
takes, which is, they own everything. They own the hardware, they own the delivery of the media,
they own all the media that they're delivering, they own the entire thing vertical, all the way
from ground zero, the silicon, hiring who's going to do the silicon, stacking it up,
all the way to the end user. They own the entire package, except for the Wi-Fi that gets you,
you know, the, the internet that gets you to your house and the Wi-Fi that talks to you while you're
there. And that is why they're going to succeed at this, because that's what Apple gets. It's the
entire experience. I just want it to work, like I ran to the last five. And I think this is just
going to work. And I'm going to say a couple of things that are going to put me like, oh my god,
I'm a hare-kick here, okay? Number one, I don't even mind that it has less apps than the Google
App Store. Because you know what I find on my iOS device that has the most fantastic app store,
the first app store, the app store that sets the bar for everybody else's app stores,
this is the way that people make the money and this is the way to go. And this is the way that
everybody should be going and everybody sees me going that way is what I have is half a dozen
to maybe say 10 apps that I use on a regular basis. I've got maybe another 15 apps
that I use on a semi-regular basis. And I've got a bunch of apps out there that I
put on to the device because it was free and I thought it was interesting and I've never looked
into the game. I need to go out and park my apps, just like park boot shops, shows you how you
should go out there and you should, those of us who listen to podcast and he does, he
barks his photos, right? You go out and you take 175 photos with your digital camera and then you
go through and you start throwing out the ones that aren't any good. Well, I need to do that on my apps,
okay? I could have a device that has the capacity of memory, that's what does. If I didn't have all
these apps, then I never looked at. I would rather have 75 apps that are really insanely great
than, you know, but, you know, everybody out there going to the app store, that's what gets
the developers. So I need them thriving out community, but you know, I'm going to try not to load
apps on this thing and let's not really use them. I've got to figure out how good I'd like
sequester them and figure out, hey, you have a test list for two weeks. I'd love a machine that
said, you know, you have a test list after the month, you want me to delete it for you, you have
for no, or maybe I can just tell it's automatically, don't even tell me.
I know apps are the big, newest thing, but you know, most of the time I go out with a web browser
or I use the app and I'm in the app and I find something interesting. So let's take the Google
Plus app for you. So the Google Plus app has something interesting that somebody posts.
Am I plus at a Google Plus? And then I also want to save it over in every notes, right? Or post it
on Twitter or other things like that. Now I know I can do a post there from Google Plus,
but that doesn't post the actual link. That post to Twitter, the link back to Google Plus,
that then they have to go through that to find the link. So I want to do the actual link.
I want to do something else with this, right? I want to save it over in every note,
spring note, inst paper, all these kinds of things. So I click on the link and it takes the over
and it doesn't matter. Believe it's the same for Android and for iOS. Either one takes me over
to its own internal browser. That's got a little thing there that says, oh, okay, normally that
little icon with a little curvy arrow on it square around it, you know the one I mean, right?
Normally that means, oh, that means that I can email this because most of the time I call these things in, right?
What? Excuse me. I know you're not too surprised. Most of the time I just mail myself the link.
So that's usually the mail myself. Now that's all printed up in whatever the browser choices for the
device. So I got to click that, go over to the browser choice device and then I can mail myself the link.
Or mail it to every note or do whatever it is I want to do with it. So all the ad does is get me to whatever
it is I want to see, but half the time it takes me to a browser anyway to do anything else.
I could live in an HTML5 world as long as people work innovating in the HTML5 and it just worked
it by browser. I could live back there as well that started out in iOS with with Safari on the
iPhone where there were any apps. I've just been honest here that how I live in Linux most of the
time admitted unless you're using a full scale application or program whatever you want to call it
like to edit your, or whatever other gitscam, other things to edit your photos, a full-blown word
processor, those kinds of things. Unless you're doing something that really requires a full-blown
application which they should not use in the tablet anyway. To interact with all these
other systems, what do you have to do? You have to use the web-based interface. I just used to
use the web-based interfaces. Now maybe I'm giving up and maybe I'm saying, but you know the web-based
interfaces aren't that bad and this is just the way I use the device. So I think this would work out
pretty good. Another comment he made on the All Touch tablet thing was about how it wasn't for
productivity. It was just for consuming media which I got a problem with. I want to consume media
with it. That's what I wanted to do. I want to read books. I want to watch a movie. I want to
you know listen to some music. I want to consume media on it and I think it's going to be very good
for that and I know that's what it's designed for. But this whole thing it's not for productivity.
Well isn't that exactly the same thing that everybody says about the iPad when it came out?
Isn't that everything that everybody says if saying on a regular basis I think it's probably people
who don't use you know tablet devices very much says that they don't get tablets and why they
would want a tablet because it's not what they do that's not what they're productive with.
The iPad was a media consumption device until people started digging out how to be productive with it.
And applications started getting put on to it or developed for it to make it productive.
I don't think that Amazon is going to diss the way people from developing applications or
having applications in the store that you can load onto this that can make you more productive.
The other thing I figured out what he mentioned was it doesn't have a microphone.
I carried around an iPod touch for several years before I started carrying around this iPhone.
It didn't have a microphone either and you know how I recorded things on the device the same
exact way I'm talking to you. I used an external microphone that was an iPhone headset
and you know what I bet you money now I may be proven wrong but I'll bet you money that there
will be it's going to be a standard three and a half inch headset and if Amazon was stupid enough
to not have that headset wired to use the standard plug that lots and lots of phones and
mobile devices used to have a microphone in addition to the stereo headset then they made a stupid move
and I'll grant you they may have been stupid and they may not have done that but I think that the
microphone thing is going to solve itself I may be proven wrong but I would be you know we I would
not be surprised at all let's say I'm not so sure I would go so far said be shocked if it didn't
but I would truly not be surprised at all if you could take the standard kind of it's got a tip
and three rings and a sleeve are two rings and a sleeve instead of the tip ring sleeve
of a standard stereo and it will be wired exactly the same so that I could plug my microphone
headset into it and then I can record that device they proved it truth be right they proved
right now it's the day before the new iPhone is going to be it down on the fourth of October
in the year of our Lord 2011 and so we'll see what it is that they do to muddy up the waters
and announce what they're going to have for their next model which of course then everybody
will be screwing around and saying who is the better than this or is this worse than this
and it will cause another big up to work so I'm right between the one and the other kind of a
little bit of a calm here and why frankly I noticed that there wasn't a lot of shows out there
other than Clot 2 and I love Clot 2 shows don't get me wrong but if you're tired of hearing me
and Clot 2 and Ken talking all the time our hacker public radio call in the way I just did
and tell me why I am full of carp it's a diagram about tablets and about how you know everything
about tablets and I'm wrong it should be 10 inches and it should have cameras and this is how I
use it and do that okay it might sound like I'm dying but I'm not but just in case I am
somebody else got a calling chose okay now please do not I know you won't find this too
hard to believe either what I'm actually doing it's on my way home I'm going to look at a rim
playbook and you know why I'm going to go look at the rim playbook because what everybody says is
basically the outside show and a lot of the hardware that's going to be on this Amazon
tablet it's all made by the same company and the closest thing that anybody has said that they
think to this is the rim playbook and I'm going to go and I'm going to look at the rim playbook
for bill quality and wait and how it feels and just get a feeling for you know what kind of bill
quality I'm going to expect as the sounds on tablet just in anticipation so yes I'm going to go
window shopping on this thing that I don't even it's not even really this thing I'm interested in
buying but I have a close second I'm going to go window shop a little bit before I head home so
what do you think is this going to revolutionize the world isn't going to basically define the other
tablet and it'll be between Amazon and Apple is Microsoft actually going to come out with
something that is an ecosystem that is going to compete with this with a Windows 8 version of the
tablet is Google going to come back and get some kind of partnership with people with the
media side and finally take control which kind of gives that whole openness aspect of Android is
open right everybody likes Android because it isn't a wall garden the way Apple's
device is a wall garden but they kind of wish that Google would control what people did and
didn't let them just do anything they wanted it's kind of funny you got to admit but the most
exciting news and I hope to be able to call on a show about this once I find out about it is
system 76 says that they're in the process of developing a real Linux tablet now that folks
will be exciting bye now
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