RUMOR CITY
With HP’s two terminated Touchpads suddenly taking over the top selling slots at Amazon from the Kindle and the iPod Touch, even at heftier prices than HP’s discounted prices that were announced Saturday before selling out Sunday at those attractive prices ($99~ and $150~), Kindle and Amazon Android tablet rumors are hitting the news again.
I tried getting the 32gig HP Sunday morning for $150 but they were sold out everywhere. Why? Real, dedicated Multitasking (unlike Apple’s suspended type), the popular Beats Audio sound, Flash video (blank on the iPad), Hulu and CBS, etc., directly available on the tablet, at the $99-$150 price.
It’s amazing that a killed product (with no promise of software updates for the webOS tablet version, although HP plans to keep developing webOS) would sell at $350 to $400+ at Amazon currently. HP had 275,000 to sell, and Best Buy was able to sell only 25,000, so HP decided it was not worth continuing the month old tablet. Maybe Amazon’s rumored tablets were a factor. And the reports that webOS crashed too much, the battery life was poor, and the touch response not as good as with iOS or even Windows Phone 7.
The discontinued Touchpads topping Amazon’s US sales yesterday proved one thing: there is strong consumer interest for affordable tablets from a trusted maker.
As a gadget person myself, I’ve never been able to justify paying a minimum of $500 for a WiFi 10″ tablet by anyone, when what it does can’t match what I can easily do on my 10″ netbook. If a company were to charge about half of that, take a loss on the hardware while making money from the content sold for it, I’m in.
Amazon tablet rumors galore
Amazon Android tablet rumors were all over the news last night. Earlier this week some had noticed that Lab126, Amazon’s subsidiary that designed and engineered the Kindle and which promises “the next revolution” on an image of a coming device, applied to trademark the term “Lab126” and its long-time logo (see top, left), which some think could “do double duty as branding” for the Amazon tablet.
Lab126’s careers page has listed, for some time, jobs available for those with firm work backgrounds in research and design of “high profile, portable, hand-held consumer elecronics.” Geekwire points out that these were filed (Aug. 16) under the classification, “design and development of computer hardware and software.”
Kindlescribe.com- more rumors
Add to that the news yesterday that Amazon has registered KindleScribe.com (and also grabbed KindleScribes.com to protect its use by others, I imagine), and the news-world is understandably hoping that the next Kindle or Kindle-inspired tablet will have a stylus and writing-software (as with the HTC ‘scribe’.
Nowadays, you can hide the site-owner’s name on WHOIS sites for $5~, so Amazon made a decision that this new domain name could be public. Nevertheless, from that, what we’re seeing is just conjecture, but I’d say the domain name does indicate something’s up.
In early August, Amazon registered a new domain name, KindleAir.com and that sparked interest of course. Does it have to do with Whispernet? (Doesn’t it always?). Lightness?
Several news sites say Amazon has been dropping info here and there, and it’s likely they want to build anticipation and maybe slow down sales of other devices until they’re ready to announce whatever may come before October, although the more advanced tablet much rumored wouldn’t be ready until the end of the year but in time for the Holidays (as these rumors go).
In the meantime, the Kindlestore has dropped prices on refurbished Kindles, AT&T stores are now selling the $139 Special Offers 3G model as of yesterday, and we’re seeing new discounts on some Kindle accessories — the latter happened about a month before the Kindle 3 was announced.
Thanks to Jesslyn – MyKindleStuff and Nancy Picchi – IslandLibrarian for news alerts last night.
